Barcelona

Early morning finds us meeting up in lobby with Thelma and Don and on to the shuttle bus to the airport. Our flight to Barcelona was at 9:15 so time for an expensive coffee and toast while waiting. This gave us time to catch up on T and D's few days in London with other family. We all were feeling a bit weary from some great visiting, and now looking forward to getting on the ship, but first a day in Barcelona. We landed to a very rainy day, once again hauled our luggage on to bus and rode to Placa d' Catalunya. I had spent many hours using google maps to walk the way from the square to our hotel but somehow when getting off I had my map upside down in my head and we headed the wrong way. We spent a couple of hours looking at maps, looking at street signs, asking non English speaking people "Where are we?" and we finally got one old man who took a lot of time to tell us how to get back to where we should be. He spoke Spanish but with many pictures drawn on a paper, us picking up a word or two , lots of nods and "Si's", we started back to where we should be. He stayed with us until he figured these dumb Canadians were going in the right direction. It is not a pretty picture of 4 old people hauling too much luggage, wearing back packs, getting rained on and very frustrated in Spain. We found our hotel called Hosteria Grau and hauled our luggage up the stairs and collapsed in our rooms. It was not long before Harvey and Don were into a cribbage game, Thelma rested and I became very frustrated with none, or very weak wireless connection. It comes in and out and I have to shut down the computer and restart to get a connection. It is now 3:00 am and I am getting a bit better signal so trying to get this done, emails sent, and doing some research for a new port.

We have had an email from the cruise line that there is to be a big strike in Athens Greece on Thursday when we are to dock there. The last one saw many riots, fires and destruction and so they will reroute to Nafplion a seaside city in the Peloponnese region of Greece. If the strike does not happen we will still go to Athens.

By late afternoon we decided to go out to Las Ramblas (a very busy tourist infested pedestrian street) to do what all tourists do. We did get to La Bocqueria, a famous huge inside food market. Very intersting as we walked amongst the 60+ food booths looking at the great variety of different meats and produce. We headed for a Tapas bar, had supper and stopped at pastry shop for some dessert, and back to hotel for an early bed time. We have now lost another 2 hours (8 hours ahead of home) and our bodies are not really sure if they like it. I guess site seeing of Barcelona's wonderful historic places will have to wait for another time.