Having never been to Barcelona (or Spain) before this trip, it was good to have a few days to explore the city. My favorite way to explore cities is to walk. Walk everywhere. Of course, the airport is far enough from the city that we had to take a train in, but those are also fun to figure out.
Before we started the day, I had to take my parents to the airport for their flight and return the rental car. That all went quite smoothly. Instead of figuring out where the bus was, I just hiked/jogged my way back to the hotel. It was still early enough that it wasn’t too hot, and I had some tall marsh grass to keep the low Sun from burning me too badly.
Here’s the Garmin for that:
https://connect.garmin.com/app/activity/23982386104
And the only decent photo I took:
And a less good photo:
Oh right, and the turtle mosh pit:
After I got back to the hotel, we went to a nearby mall to get some lunch before our Barcelona journey. In case you were curious as to what Spanish malls look like:
The train was a bit late, but the ride itself was fairly straightforward. We took the commuter rail to the main rail station, then grabbed the subway to the big Sagrada Familia church. Here’s the only pic I took from the train:
Yikes.
As predicted, this area was BUSY AF. I’m going to post a bunch of photos the hopefully capture both the beauty of the structure and the clusterfuck of the situation. We didn’t go in, but had we wanted to, we would have needed to reserve tickets like months and months ago.
From here, Bae took us on a nice walk down through some important landmarks, ending up at where we had dinner. Here is the Garmin of that walk:
https://connect.garmin.com/app/activity/23986335246
And how about a photo dump:
If that boat photo above made you laugh, this will really make you laugh:
Having seen all of that cool shit on another hot day, we ended up at our restaurant and ate. And that food was GUD.
Dang, that made me HUNGRY. I could write a lot more about this, but I gotta be honest, I am getting a bit tired. The city seems super great and you should definitely visit.