So here’s the thing. The main part of this Spain trip was to be two weeks in the Atlantic coastal city of Cadiz. That meant our three nights in Barcelona and then two more in Madrid were just a holding pattern awaiting the beginning of the real trip. Barcelona and Madrid, Spain as mere […]

  A couple of things were left out of my last blog. When we landed early in Barcelona and then cleared customs in a breathless matter of minutes, it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet. Our apartment would not be available until 3:00 p.m. What we could do with eight hours to kill while schlepping luggage […]

DL 194 to Barcelona    The original plan to fly to Atlanta and then connect to Barcelona shriveled on the vine, so we made a quick Plan B to fly to Minneapolis and connect with a wide open (seating-wise) flight to Paris. That would get us over the pond, and from there we could refigure […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    The mistakes and missteps were beginning to pile up on this trip: The wrong date on the Figueres return ticket, saying “I’m bored” out loud. If you want to maintain a slacker’s approach to travel, you need to maintain an almost pristine record when it comes to screw-ups. Otherwise your slacker […]

   Photo credit: Carol Madigan Since Carol likes to find things, and I prefer things to find me, we’ve adapted to each other’s preferences and enjoy a mutually agreeable compatibility on the road. But every road has a bump, and we hit one today. “I had failed to maintain a Nash Equilibrium, and instead achieved  Champagne […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    Carol had already outlined what our first full day in Barcelona would consist of. Plaza Catalunya was the premier square of the city, and La Rambla the famous promenade and commercial strip that begins at the plaza and ends at the marina. It was a walking tour, and while Carol looks […]

The 14:54 to Barcelona     Judging by how full our first class carriage was, we were smart to roll the dice and reserve our seats for the TGV to Barcelona back in the states before we were sure we had seats on the plane to Paris and a confirmed hotel there. Even that early, however, the […]

As pleasant and smooth as it was, the six-hour train trip into Barcelona gave me the urge to spend the first day in town with boots on the ground. It was a fifty-minute walk from my hotel to the Sagrada Familia basilica and that seemed doable. I need a lot of walking on this trip to make up for not taking my daily walk/jog along with me. I wasn’t in a picturesque part of the city, but as I approached the $300 per night Hotel Majestic, they’d set up a piano on the sidewalk as a way of drumming up some walk-in trade. It made for a nice rest break. I also observed that the clean sidewalk and streets are maintained by hand with straw brooms and oversized dustpans.