Week 5 – Wednesday 30th July – Barcelona

Everybody has their funny little quirks and ours is that on travel day, we like to get to the airport WELL in advance of the flight to make sure that we have plenty of time to get to where we need to be, beat the queues and if we have any unforeseen glitches that we have time to remedy them so that we don’t have any hassles with getting on the designated plane.

The flight to Barcelona that we had changed onto was at 11:30, but before then we had to negotiate our way around Madrid’s ring road, drop the car off and get to the airport. Leaving at 8:30 would have been fine, and 9:00 a tight fit, so we left at 6:30 to make sure we missed all of the traffic and got very close the airport in masses of time.

Fortunately (??) Mum and Dad were leaving Milan today on their way to Australia, and had to get to there from Nice, so they had an early start and were up at 5am to text the family. This gave us an ever earlier start and so we were parked back outside the car drop off depot at 7:15 in the morning. Fortunately (and this time it was), the drop off point is beside a very large airport hotel, so we were able to head in there for an extended breakfast (with the Spanish Olympic Team, who were all decked out in there very smart outfits – blue track pants, and bright yellow shirts with red highlights).

The trip to Barcelona is 1 hour 15 minutes and we were boarded on time to a half full flight. Actually to say it is 1 hour 15 is not quite right. It’s a 50 minute flight, with a 25 minute taxi to get to the start of the runway in Madrid. The plane is in two classes – business and ours. The curtain that is always so tightly closed in New Zealand was only partially closed, so I was able to see that the business class customers were having a pleasant time and also that the pilot’s view was unobstructed, as the cockpit door was open from two minutes into the flight, until a couple of minutes before we landed. Security doesn’t seem to be quite as tight here as it is in other places.

The scenery on the flight to Barcelona astounded for how dry and flat all the land between Madrid and Barcelona is. It’s just a sea of beige for as far as the eye can see. The landscape only changed minutes before we got to the sea at Barcelona.

Barcelona airport is under reconstruction, so we were parked out on the runway and bused from one end of the airport to the other, then walked back to the other end of the terminal building to wait for our bags to be delivered, which were duly delivered after a 30 minute wait.

The taxi into town was back to quick and efficient and after checking back into the hotel, we headed up La Rambla, past Plaza de la Catalunya and up the next Rambla to find a place for lunch.

This evening, we’ve just had another walk down La Rambla and onto the Marina area amongst all the crowds of people. The living statues are still there, but in four weeks seem to have transformed themselves into an almost totally new cast. There are also a number sci-fi moonscape artists here that weren’t here last time, so I guess they travel around to different places, so as to always have a new audience to perform to.