Meandering With Murphy

My flight was wonderful. I treated myself to a mileage upgrade and loved it!!! Dinner was a great trout with an orange sauce and a really good cream of mushroom soup. They had some really good salted butter for the bread. To top it off I had a chocolate sundae topped with Scott’s favorite Biscoff Cookies! So he is was near by!

I arrived in Barcelona at 12:30 pm and at the apartment at about 2:30. Tom was waiting in the coffee shop trying to stay awake. I forgot to mention that Tom is a believer in Rick Steves tour books, suggestions for things to do and places to eat. I call him Rick Steves Jr.!

Martin met us at the apartment and checked us in. The apartment is only a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia. The apartment looked good and the balcony was very nice (always something I love!). We dropped our bags and decided to try and do the Hop On/Hop Off Bus. It stopped in front of the Sagrada Familia. However, our first big challenge was locking the door!! Oh, you say, easy enough but it was a double lock system. Turn left til it clicked, turn again and yes, it should have closed. But no, it wouldn’t close. We struggled with it for at least 5 minutes. After a lot of laughter it closed. We were not quite sure why. Oh well, we’d deal with opening it when we got home. An yes, we still struggled even thought we both tried it at least twice.

The Hop On/Hop Off bus proved to be another adventure. Everyone had to wear a mask on the bus, at least to get on. Really no consistency and no real enforcement except when boarding. We started at the Sagrada. We saw the picture and heard him describe it but that was about the last thing we understood. We kept trying to find the place he was talking about and we never found it or we found it after we had passed it. We also had a hard time understanding him. I did not take many pictures because the bus was moving and I was not sure what I was seeing.

Things we did see were the Sant Pau Cathedral, the 100,000 capacity Soccer stadium, several places Gaudi designed and some palaces the descriptions I was not able to understand.

This is Tom on the bus.

After the tour was over we went back to the apartment to regroup. We did not want to go far to eat so I found a restaurant in our neighborhood called Aitor. It got 4.2 stars on Google. It was not a 4.2 star restaurant in either my mind or Tom’s mind either. We ordered some white wine and then finally understood that we had to go inside, get a plate and select the tapas we wanted. They were about 1,80 Euros a piece. Rick Steves says that they know how many tapas you have had by the number of toothpicks that are on the plate and sure enough the waiter mentioned that.

Copa Cantarinas Verdejo and Ibérico ham tapas.

Anyway the white wine was too acidic, the béchamel sauce in the croquetas was too thin and tasted awful and not very good BUT the ham and salami tapas were fine. Certainly nothing to merit a 4.2 star rating. We left half glasses of wine and 3 of the 6 croquetas and we left to find some good wine, cheese and meats. We were successful! We selected a Catalan red wine and meat and cheese.

We took home our dinner finds, sat out on the balcony and had a “real” dinner. It was wonderful. Great conversation, good food and great company. A good start to our trip.