18th April Swapping Blighty for Barca

 So here I / we are having swapped good old Blighty for  week in Barcelona. After the rollercoaster that is always Easter, it was good to have this little sojourn in the diary, even if it is actually taking place some six months after it was originally scheduled.

Thanks to Mrs O we were able to deposit the car with her and take the super saver economy route via the 199 bus to the airport, arriving in plenty of time to negotiate dropping off our bags and negotiating security. In fact TOM's new status as 'crutch user' actually saw us whisked to the front of the queues, with me in the role of his 'devoted' carer.

The flight was 30 mins late but we managed to escape the eyes of the super vigilante Ryanair baggage checkers who appeared to be making loads of people pay for oversized hand luggage. Maybe having my disabled special needs companion made them take sympathy, who know. Or maybe like us they were too busy wondering why the feral children belonging to two families on board weren't actually in school. A passenger in the row in front of us decided they had probably already been diagnosed as being too thick for school which did make me giggle out loud.

Arriving in Barcelona, we again jumped passport queues and were out of the airport, onto a shuttle bus and following a two stop ride on the Metro, were at our AirBnB just after 9.30pm. A virtually trouble free trip.

Within a few minutes our room looked like it had been ransacked in a robbery but we were both tired enough to just collapse into bed, with part one of the Barcelona adventure successfully completed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

6th May Olbia

Image
  A chance to stretch our legs today with our first port of call; Olbia, Sardinia. And it was a quick stretch too due to it being only a five hour stay. Up bright and early, so early in fact that the hot food at the buffet wasn't even ready to be served. Still it gave us a chance to watch the ship glide into port past a host of oyster/mussel beds, before performing a 180 degree turn to reverse into it's berth. A couple of short bus rides later and we were in downtown Olbia. But there an hour or so before anything appeared to open, the disadvantage of being early birds and something we don't seem to learn! Not that Olbia had a great deal to see or maybe if we had done the slightest bit of planning beforehand there might have benn but we didn't. It was pleasant enough but that's about it. It was pleasant enough but nothing special, indeed we were back on the ship after just a couple of hours ashore and then managed to sleep away most of th...
Read more

7th May Naples

Image
 I'm sure I've heard the phrase 'see Naples and die' suggesting that it is perhaps not the nicest location in the Mediterranean but if it's good enough for Diego Maradona fir a few years then it's good enough for me for 10 hours. Although the millions of tax free pounds he was paid might have eased his stay. By the time we got up, washed, dressed and up to The Kitchens, the rest of the ship were already there. Compared to the Marie Celeste of yesterday it was absolutely packed, presumably with people having breakfast before heading out on 8am excursions, our excursion was simply going to be the city of Naples itself as possible trips to Vesuvius, Pompei or the Amalfi coast would have been too much / tired.  So on a day when the weather initially seemed uncertain, we jumped aboard route A for the Hop on Hop off bus and headed out into the mayhem that is the Napoli traffic where it was every van, car and scooter for the selves. I think it's bes...
Read more