Craig's blog

We spent today touring Barcelona.  After breakfast in the hotel, we took a taxi to Guell Park and walked around it.  You have to pay to go to the center of the park that shows off the architecture of Gaudi and tickets weren’t available for a couple of hours, so we just walked around it.  It’s very hilly and gave commanding views of the city.  It was great.  I was very happy with the weather – maybe 80 degrees and slightly humid, but Patty was missing the cool London weather.

Next we took a taxi to the Boqueria Market.  We met Diane & Jim at the entrance (intentionally) to begin the shared portion of our trips.  Boqueria is a huge open-air food market with seafood, fruits, vegetables, candy, etc.  It was awesome, although we walked through it rather quickly.  We then went to a small tapas restaurant for lunch.  It was tough to understand the menu and to order and the food was good, but not great.

Next the women when shopping and Jim and I decided to walk to the beach.  It was about 1.5 miles each way in the hot afternoon sun and the beach was amazing.  On the one hand it was gorgeous (or would have been if we could have seen any of it), but it was the busiest beach I have ever seen in my life.  There were people everywhere on the sand (and tons of umbrellas).  Just walking to water was very difficult.  I walked over and put my feet in – the water was probably 84 degrees.  What a scene!  We then walked back and found the girls at a restaurant where they were having Cokes. 

We then walked another mile to Jim & Diane’s apartment where some of us rested and Patty and Diane went across the street to tour a building designed by Gaudi.

Finally we walked to dinner at a fabulous restaurant called Cerveceria Catalana.  It was awesome.  Diane and Jim had gone there a couple of nights before.  The waiter helped us order and we had awesome seafood, pork for Jessie, veggie dishes for Kelli, etc.  What a great meal.  Everyone loved it.

We then waited a while for one of the big taxis that can hold our family of 5 and then went home to our hotel.