First of all, maybe I should explain why Dean and I took off for 12 days to Europe when the stock market was crashing and we had already blown our life savings in Russia just a few months prior. Close to My Heart offers cruises/trips to its consultants that achieve certain levels of sales, etc. during the year. I earned this trip with Close to My Heart. The Paris portion was an add on (with free airfare why not take a stop in Paris) but since we used the subways and buses and bought museum passes, we did Paris very cheaply. It was truly a once in a lifetime trip that we have been looking forward to for several months. I feel very blessed that I had a good year with my Close to My Heart business and was able to earn this amazing trip. And now, on to Barcelona.
We left our cute little chateau at the Marriott Vacation Club in Paris at 4:30 am Saturday morning and flew to Barcelona, Spain. Wow, what a contrast in cities. Both are beautiful. But both are very different.
By the time we made it to our hotel and grabbed something quick to eat, it was late morning so we took a train to the monastery of Montserrat above the city. Beautiful place. You can see the monastery here. We took a tram up which was a little nerve wracking for Dean but not as bad as the elevator up the Eiffel Tower he says.
We didn’t expect a small city at the top of this hill but there it was. Shops, restaurants, a church, the monastery. There was even a hotel you could stay at here. The church was amazing. There was a wedding going on so I felt like we were intruding (along with a few hundred other tourists). Here we all are in front of the square.
If you proceed up the stairs and through the arches behind us, you will find this.
And if you go inside, you find this.
Beautiful isn’t it? The wedding party was up at the front.
Here is another view of the monastery from the top.
Barcelona is a partying city. We walked down Ramblas Street and it was packed with tourists and locals. This is in the Gothic part, the older part of the city. The little side streets are so narrow. Along this street there were bird shops, flower shops, sidewalk cafes, street performers. We got our picture taken with one.
We found out some of the people traveling with Close to My Heart were pick pocketed on this street while taking pictures with one of the many street performers. Either we got an honest one or we just got lucky. We were pretty careful.
We walked what seemed like miles to get to a recommended restaurant called Freeway. We got there at 8:15 pm, starving and tired. Dean said it was the first time I had worn out before he had on a vacation. We found out the restaurant didn’t open until 9:00 pm. So we waited. It was worth the wait. It was a big buffet. You chose your entrees and they cooked them right in front of you. After eating, we headed back to the hotel about 10:30 pm. The locals were just getting started but we were exhausted.
After a few hours of sleep at the Fira Palace Hotel, (we had some partiers in the room near us), we were up for a tour of the city. We saw some of the homes built by Gaudi and also the Sagrada Familia (hope I’m spelling that correctly). We didn’t have time to go inside this amazing, still in progress, cathedral but it was beautiful.
My favorite stop was the next one at some gardens designed by Gaudi above the city. It was beautiful and calm. There are no straight lines in Gaudi’s designs because he believed everything should be fluid as though it were alive. This garden had some great examples of that as well.
Here is another example—the porcelain was taken from various factories and it was all discarded and broken materials that they pieced together into mosaics.
And from the garden we were off to our ship. Enjoyed Barcelona. Wish I could have seen more. This cruise was very much like that--too little time and too much to see.
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