Day 7 Barcelona, Spain.
It won’t take much more for Barcelona to spring board to the top of my favorite places. We have only spent one day here and I really like it so far. Today we did our first (and only) of the boat provided excursions. We signed up for a biking through Barcelona tour. It was great, a lot of fun, very informative, and biking is a great way for us to see new places. Biking around all of the places we have been is what we should have been doing every day of this trip. Maybe today started a new tradition and we will do it every day after today. We are still here in Barcelona tomorrow and plan to hire bikes on our own to see a lot more of the city than we did during todays bike ride. We did not see that much of Barcelona, but what we did see was amazing. Barcelona is a great combination of ancient buildings with history and modern buildings with new stories and luxury. We wandered around for several more hours after the bike ride. We saw a tiny dog with the biggest swingingest dick. I have never seen a dog with so much confidence. He has such a package that it just flopped out from underneath him, side to side, out both sides of his body as he walked. After we stopped following and staring at this 7th wonder of a dog we went into a museum. It was built on top of 2000 year old ruins that were discovered fairly recently. The history of this city seems extremely more interesting than most other places. Barcelona is right on the Mediterranean Sea with marvelous beaches. However until recently (probably the Olympics), they never acknowledged the sea was there. They had their “backs to the sea”…that is their expression. Barcelona was mainly an industrial town. I never thought I would have enjoyed some place in Spain as much as I did. We are here overnight so hopefully we are going out for authentic paella for dinner, somewhere the tourists don’t go, ha. Even at 3pm a lot of stuff here is still closed. Most things open around 5pm we were told. Some areas were these ancient tiny desolate streets with shops that were just not open for the night yet. At 9am this morning, the beginning of our bike tour, we had the entire streets to ourselves. Everyone was still sleeping. Siestas are a legitimate thing here. Wifey is enjoying the fact that siestas are so well accepted. I do my best to fight them off.
I finished a couple more books about cameras so far this trip. Stupid Matt Urban.
We found 2 geocaches today and looked for several more. Geocaches are hard to find here because of the combination of poor satellite reception and the language barrier. All the streets are tiny and the buildings tower over most areas not letting the sunlight (or satellites) get to the ground.
We went out for dinner and had authentic paella, it was scrum-diddly-umptious! We also found gay-town while we were out tonight. That seems to happen everywhere we go. This town is really hopping at night. We stayed out until eleven which is unheard of for this elderly couple (half elderly anyway). Also found one more geocache while out wandering around at night.
Day 8 Barcelona, Spain day 2.
I would love to stay in Barcelona a few more days. Sleep has not evaded us this trip. We slept in later than I planned. We went straight to a bike rental shop and that is how we spent the day. We covered more ground but didn’t have much time to see many things. We did the one thing Wifey wanted to do, visit the Familia Sagrada church. We also went to the museum of Casa Batllo. My new favorite human Antoni Gaudi designed both the church and the Casa Batllo. I plan to learn and read much more about him in the future. He made a church, kind of a church so far, that even I would go to. Barcelona has a great service of providing bikes to the locals that is unique, from what I have seen. It is called Bicing and it seems awesome. It costs 30 euros per year to be a member. They have bike stations all over the city. You can just grab one and then leave it wherever your destination is. Seems like a fantastic service. We couldn’t use it though, so we had to get a daily rental of a couple bikes made in 1925. Wifey went back to the boat a bit earlier than I did. She had an appointment. I continued to cruise around town on my awesome bicycle and found a couple geocaches, met some locals, and kept a guarded eye on my wallet.
A select few pictures are here.
