Barcelona was the beginning of our longest trip yet.
We were there for a week before boarding the Regent Seven Seas Splendor for a cruise down the west coast of Africa to Cape Town. From there, we would continue traveling through southern Africa before finally returning home about eight weeks after we'd left.
Even before we arrived, the length of the trip felt unusual.
Sitting in the Air France lounge at LAX, eating beef bourguignon, Niçoise salad, ratatouille, cheese and baguette, I remember thinking how strange it was that we were about to get on an airplane and not come home for eight weeks.
It still felt a little like we were borrowing someone else's life.
Settling In
We arrived in Barcelona, checked into our hotel, took a nap and then went out walking.
Our luggage hadn't made the connection with us, something I later realized I'd almost completely forgotten. Apparently we weren't terribly concerned about it. We assumed it would eventually catch up with us, and it did.
We bought Metro passes with the help of an attendant and quickly became comfortable getting around the city on public transportation.
That became one of the things we enjoyed most about Barcelona.
Rather than taking taxis everywhere, we walked and rode the Metro. We liked being among everyone else going about their lives, and Shirley commented that riding public transportation somehow made us feel more grounded.
On our first night, we wandered into a neighborhood restaurant called Bugui and had shrimp, chicken, salad, beer and wine. We liked it enough that we returned several times during the week, sometimes just for a salad and a glass of wine at the end of the day.
The Gothic Quarter
One of our first full days was spent exploring the Gothic Quarter.
We walked La Rambla and stopped at La Boqueria, the enormous food market packed with stalls selling meat, seafood, produce, prepared foods and drinks. It was crowded and colorful, and we immediately thought it would be fun to spend enough time in Barcelona to actually shop and eat there rather than simply walk through.
At the Museu d'Història de Barcelona, we descended below the modern city and walked among Roman ruins nearly 2,000 years old.
Later we visited Barcelona Cathedral and climbed to the roof for views over the city. We saw the much-photographed Pont del Bisbe and the surviving Roman columns at the Temple of Augustus.
Mostly, we walked.
And walked.
And walked.
Gaudí
We visited Park Güell and walked from there through the Gràcia neighborhood toward Casa Batlló.
But the place that really stayed with us was Sagrada Família.
We joined a guided group tour, which helped us understand some of what we were seeing.
The building was extraordinary.
The exterior was covered in details and sculptures that would have been easy to miss without someone explaining them. Inside, the columns, height and stained glass were unlike anything we'd seen before.
My notes from that day were considerably less eloquent: "Wow, I don't have the words to describe it."
That still seems about right.
Museums, Rain and a Long Trip Home
One rainy day we visited the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya and then the Picasso Museum.
By the time we left, the rain had become much heavier.
We headed toward the Metro to return to the hotel and discovered that the station was closed because of the rain.
So we walked to another.
Closed.
Then another.
Also closed.
Eventually a Metro employee directed us to another line. We followed his instructions, only to discover that an accident had caused additional Metro lines to shut down.
We came back above ground into pouring rain.
Taxis were booked. We stopped at a café and waited for a while, then finally decided we'd start walking toward the hotel and figure it out along the way.
As I stood up to leave, I happened to see an available taxi stopped at a red light outside.
I ran out and flagged it down.
We arrived back at the hotel with soaked shoes and another small travel lesson: carry a spare phone battery. We'd been using our phones constantly for directions, and mine was below 15 percent by the time we got back.
As I wrote that night: "Now back at the hotel, shoes soaked. It's part of the story."
Montjuïc and the Waterfront
Later in the week we headed toward Montjuïc Castle.
The funicular wasn't operating, so we walked part of the way uphill before taking the cable car. After wandering around the castle, we took another cable car down toward the beach.
We walked along the waterfront, stopped for a late lunch, then continued toward Ciutadella Park and the Arc de Triomf before taking the Metro back to the hotel.
By coincidence, the man who had helped us navigate the Metro closures during the rainstorm was riding the same train. He recognized us and stopped to say hello.
Everyday Barcelona
Some of our memories aren't really tourist attractions at all.
We noticed how much people walked.
We noticed apartment buildings with shops and restaurants at street level and people carrying groceries or dry cleaning home on foot.
We learned that dinner happened much later than we were accustomed to. One evening around 7:00, we wondered why the streets seemed strangely quiet. A waitress explained that people would begin appearing later, and sure enough, by around 9:00 the streets outside our hotel were packed.
We also began doing ordinary things ourselves.
On our last morning, we needed resealable plastic bags. Instead of getting into a car as we probably would have at home, we walked to a neighborhood market, bought a box and walked back.
It was a tiny thing, but by then it felt completely normal.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember walking through Roman streets buried beneath the modern city.
We'll remember looking up inside Sagrada Família and struggling to understand how someone could have imagined it, much less built it.
We'll remember riding the Metro everywhere and walking through neighborhoods rather than simply moving between tourist attractions by taxi.
We'll remember La Boqueria and thinking we'd like to come back someday with enough time to actually shop there.
We'll remember the rainstorm, one closed Metro station after another, wet shoes and the lucky taxi at the red light.
We'll remember meals that ranged from excellent to merely okay, plenty of wine, and repeatedly ending up back at the little restaurant near our hotel.
And we'll remember how easy Barcelona felt to explore.
Would We Return?
Yes.
By our last day, we'd spent a week in Barcelona and felt as though we'd only begun to understand it.
The people were friendly. Getting around was easy. English was widely spoken, and when it wasn't, we managed with our limited vocabulary and Google Translate. We liked walking, using public transportation, eating in neighborhood restaurants and having enough time that every day didn't need to be packed with sightseeing.
We'd happily return and stay longer.
On December 19, we packed our bags and headed for the ship.
Barcelona had been the destination for a week.
Now it became the starting point for Africa.