Saturday Oct 13, 2012 – Barcelona

I had a smooth plane ride from Philly to Barcelona, everything was on time even though the plane was full. We landed around 8:30 and I went to the hotel, dropped off my bag and headed into the city to look for my favorite cathederal. I took a taxi to Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia to see how much progress there was on the construction since our last visit two years ago.

There was a line to buy tickets and walked around to corner to see that it was over two blocks long. I was deciding whether to wait when it started to rain, so I bought a cheap umbrella at a souvineer shop. Since the line to get inside hadn’t moved, I opted for the 40 minute walk back through the city. I wandered back to the main street in the tourist section (la Rambla) where I could get a free shuttle back to the hotel. I got back a little past 1:00 and took a nap until 6:00 when I got some dinner and caught a hop to the airport where I met Mary arriving on her flight from Dublin.

She had a great couple of weeks with her cousins in Ireland and I eagerly listened to family adventure stories until the jet lag caught up to me. Saturday morning we checked out and caught a ride to the cruise ship terminal and climbed onboard the Norwegian Spirit, our home for the next 12 nights.

Barcelona is a major cruise starting and stopping point; it has a huge deep water harbor and there were at least 6 big cruise ships in port when we got to the terminal. We boarded, found our room, unpacked bags and went out to explore the ship. Among all the things to do we found 14 bars and restaurants that will help us with our weight management goals for the next couple of weeks. One of the bars even had a pool table and I told Mary it proved that Mediterranean cruises are always smooth sailing.

It was warm when we left port at 7:00pm so we had dinner outside on deck as we sailed away. We were on our way; our first stop is Sunday morning in Toulon, France.