Barcelona Again

Playground at the Villanova campground

30 March 2008: We woke at the crack of down to get Caitlin to the airport. I know, I shouldn’t complain. Life’s been pretty good when you only have to be somewhere by a certain time a couple times in a little over a month. It’s just that none of us could sleep that night for some reason. Then, the GPS wouldn’t send us the right way, and another mishap or two along the way. (Or, maybe it really was my brain that just couldn’t wake up!) Anyway, we at least still made it with over an hour to spare. (…and she was checking in for a domestic flight: Barcelona-Frankfurt-San Francisco.) We were already pretty stressed when the line to check in took a while. Then, when we got up there, the ticket agent said that for her 10:45am flight, that it was now 11:21am. I thought, “Oh great, she won’t have to be running to the gate!” But, she corrected my thoughts by further saying that the time changed, and it was an hour later than we thought. She also informed us that this was a worldwide change. Caitlin pointed out that in California, the time had changed 3 weeks ago. But, she didn’t seem to care… I suppose that it was a moot point, as her plane had already left. So, off to change her tickets! The only thing they had was for the next day, and for a fee, although not too outrageous. But, that was all we could do. I suppose, at least she wouldn’t miss any school, but wouldn’t have that extra day anymore to adjust to the time change. I seriously feel like our family hasn’t had the best of luck with scheduled flights this past year!

We decide to go into town after the airport, as we were running low on denero (cash) and wanted to get back to the one and only ATM in Spain that actually worked for us. Guess what – our old standby ATM decides not to work for us! I also needed to charge up our new cell phone with more minutes, which I see as an option to do on ATM machines. But, I tried on every ATM machine throughout the main area of Barcelona and no luck! The store where we bought the phone from was also closed. Last, we wanted to stock up on groceries before leaving Barcelona, but all the markets were closed as well!

So instead, lunch. We also didn’t have much luck with the first place we picked for lunch (The waiter rubbed me wrong, felt like he tagged us as tourists and tried to up-sell us everything in the place. But, what can you expect right on La Ramblas and open on a Sunday…) We promptly ate/drank what we started with and left for somewhere else. We loved the second place, another restaurant behind La Boqueria (closed on Sundays too!) called “Something Rouge”, a French restaurant. If you go to Barcelona, I’d definitely recommend anything behind La Boqueria as we’ve had great luck with two out of the three, and the third looked pretty awesome too. This place was muy (very) affordable too! It was almost the same price for a 3 course lunch, including drinks, which we paid for the 2 bites at the first place!

We returned back to the campground…for one more night. What we wanted to accomplish while we were there: do laundry, get wifi (especially so Caitlin could tell people back home she missed her flight) and get more water. The market with water was closed, the wifi wouldn’t reach our camper and, by then, we gave up on the laundry. So overall, we had a pretty frustrating day, except the nice lunch. I guess you can’t expect perfection all the time though!