Sheep Guarding Llama

One of the dangers of long term travel is that you need days dedicated to doing all kinds of utilitarian stuff, stuff that isn’t fun or interesting but needs your attention.  Today was not supposed to be that day for us but it ended up being it anyway, much to our chagrin.

We got up late today – I am guessing that the flight and then a day in the sun just took too much out of us.  You can only do so much before you need to sleep in and relax.  So we slept in too long and didn’t get started on doing logistical tasks from the hotel room until around nine or later.

Our big task today, as we have let it go until the last minute and now it is an emergency, is figuring out how we are going to get to Portugal.  We have been talking about renting a car and driving across Spain to give ourselves a way to go see Andalucia in the south of Spain which is not as much out of the way as it might seem.  This is one of the regions of Europe that we are going to be nearest too and that we really want to see but that we currently don’t have in the schedule at all.  Since we don’t have a train or a plane booked and no idea how we were going to do that it seemed like the best plan.

Well I called Avis and they were willing to rent us a car for a reasonable price – if we had a fax machine.  What?  Who has a fax machine today?  Even most businesses do not have one let alone private people, especially those on vacation wanting to rent a Fiat Panda with child seats!  So that did not work out and we are not happy with Avis.  No way to rent a car without a fax rules out using them in the States too.  How anti-customer service can you be?  And I had been so happy with them just a week ago in Italy.  Talk about turning away a real customer.  Insane.

So we tride Europcar but their website does not work at all and they don’t offer any means of communicating via telephone but only through email.  We sent them an email but did not get a response before we were able to get out of the door.

We decided that the best option was just to ride the red line tour bus up to Barcelona Sants, the main train station, and talk to the car rental places there, in person, to figure out what to do.

By the time that we actually left it was nearly noon.  Where does the morning go?

The red line is not the fastest way across town but it is really easy and low stress so we opted for that over the metro.  We already had both for either so it was totally a decision based on convenience.

We got the Barcelona Sants and found Avis.  We talked to them and they said that they could rent us a car but that it was be almost double the price that Avis had quoted on the phone.  They admitted that the price was horrible and said that the fax issue was ridiculous but that was that.  Just really bad customer service from Avis.  (Later we would get an email from Europcar saying that they would not rent us a car for Spain to Portugal at all.)

So since Avis was insane we decided to look into our original plan of taking a normal, high speed train to Madrid and taking the overnight train from Madrid to Lisbon.  We were already in the train station so this was the time to figure this out.

The original plan, from when we first left the States, was to go to Madrid via rail early tomorrow morning, spend the day sightseeing in Madrid then take the overnight tomorrow night.  So we are back to that plan.

We tried to book a train while we were there but we had not thought to bring our EURail pass with us as we were not looking to book a train when we set out so we had a dilemma.  I can move much faster than Dominica normally and way faster without the girls.  So I gave them my cash and took off alone (sans mobile as the phone had died in the morning and we had left it in the hotel plugged in to charge while we were out) to take the Metro across the city to the hotel, grab the EURail pass and get back to Sants.

To me the journey seemed to go pretty quickly.  But to Dominica and the girls it was a slow and painful afternoon.  I felt like the whole trip took under an hour but Dominica was later sure that it had taken closer to two and a half hours.  In any case, we burned up our day very quickly but I made it back with the EURail pass without any problems and without getting lost at all.

We found out that the overnight train for tomorrow night is booked.  Oh no, this isn’t good.  We decided quickly to book the next night, the night of the sixteenth, and figure everything else out from there.  This move from Barcelona to Lisbon is proving to be really hard.  At least now we definitely have a means to get across the international border which apparently cannot be done with a rental car so that hardest part is solved.   Now we have to cancel the first night of our hotel in Portugal and we have to figure out how to get to Madrid before it is time to catch the overnight train.

There was nothing to be done right away so we left Sants as quickly as we could.  Dominica just could not stand being there any longer.  Before we did, though, we stopped by the gift store to buy a little plastic dog for Liesl.  It is a little French bulldog, like many of her other plastic animals, but Dominica told her that we had to check with me first to see if it was too close to Oreo and if it would make me too sad.  Liesl was asleep at the time that we returned to the store but if she wants a reminder of Oreo to play with, I’m not going to tell her that she can’t have it.

Luciana was awake while we were shopping for Liesl’s toy and we know that she is noticing that Liesl has and gets more toys than her so we let her pick some stuff out.  She gravitated to some stuffed animals that were way too big to take with us but I found some small ones and she got crazy excited about a little stuffed wold and then a little stuffed lion.  She grabbed both and held them close and gave them kisses.  It was crazy adorable.  We couldn’t possibly say no to that.  She she got both.  What suckers we are.

We left Sants on the Metro and made our way up to the north west to go see one of the major sights of the city that is not visible from the buses – the Park Guell.  On the walk there we stopped at a quiet restaurant called StoreCafe (that’s just the name, it was not a part of a store or anything like that) where we got authentic Catalan paella.  To most of the world, paella is considered to be the national food of Spain but, in reality, the Spanish consider it to be a Catalan cuisine item, but like burritos in the US which most Americans consider to be regional to Texas but are available everywhere.  So getting paella here in Catalunya is exactly where we wanted to get it, and it was awesome.

Think of paella like the word “Yankee.”  To a foreigner, Yankee is a term for any American.  To a southerner it refers to a northerner.  To a northerner it refers to a New Englander.  It’s a specific, small region reference that has become famous and confused the farther out that you go.  Paella is just like that.  To an American it is the symbol of Spain.  But to the Spanish it is the symbol of a very distinct region where Spanish isn’t even the main language and the culture is very different.  To Catalans, it is specifically the food of their second city Valencia.

The walk from the Metro stop was pretty crazy – a horribly steep climb with these “traction” things in the sidewalk that made pushing the stroller nearly impossible.  It was too much for Dominica so I had to carry Luciana in the carrier while pushing Liesl in the stroller up this hill.

The park was simply amazing.  This is the park that Gaudi designed but did not complete.  It remains a masterpiece though and had tons of visitors and we really liked it.  We only walked around so much as it was full of vertical changes which were pretty exhausting and there were a lot of steps which are tough with the stroller.  We probably spent an hour in the park.  Very worthwhile going to visit.

From the park we decided to try walking halfway across the city, two kilometers, to the Sagrada Familia rather than trying to take the metro there.  We stopped and got gelato, which I had promised Liesl earlier in the day, near the Park Guell.  It was really good but still not Boppard.  Little chance of anything catching Boppard this late in our trip.

The walk was really nice.  We found some great neighbourhoods and Dominica managed to figure out where some of the places that we were shown from the tour bus were so we got to actually experience some of the famous bits of Barcelona like the famous strolling boulevard.

While on our walk we passed by a patisserie with the most amazing looking meringues in the window.  We all love meringues so I ran in to buy some.  We stopped along the boulevard and we all split one of them.  It was huge and it turned out to be filled with almonds.  Delicious.  We had no idea that you could even make a meringue like this.

It was a good hike to the Sagrada Familia but not too bad and we were both glad that we walked it rather than going down and riding the Metro again.  The exercise was good as was getting to see all of that part of the city between those points.  That gave us a much better feel for how the day to day parts of the city, not the tourist bits, actually functions.

We arrived at the Sagrada Familia and walked around for a while.  It was closed because we were so late but the important bit is seeing the outside, not the inside, so we were not too disappointed although we hope to return and do the inside too someday (not on this trip.)

The Sagrada Familia was started in 1882 with Gaudi taking over and making it is own, and his life work, in 1883.  So this year is the 130th year of construction there and it is this year that construction passed the halfway point.  When construction started it was estimated that it would take hundreds of years to complete.  The project is already something like one hundred years ahead of schedule and that is after losing many years in the middle of the century as construction stopped because of the Civil War.  And construction is completely funded by private donations, not by the city, state or the Church.  In 2010 the Pope, King and Queen consecrated the church as a minor basilica so it is now an “in use” church.

We walked to the other side where there is a park and a playground and let Liesl and Luciana play in the playground there next to a small dog park while Dominica and I took turns sitting on the park benches and contemplating what many consider the greatest architectural masterpiece in the world.  There is a reflecting pond there so that you can look at the basilica twice at once.  Really amazing.

We walked all of the way around very slowly.  It takes a lot of time to take in the Sagrada Familia.  You could spend all day just looking at it.  There is so much artistry to consider just in the facade!  The building actually seems to be alive, like it grew up out of the earth and might spring up and chase you at any moment.  Really amazing.

It was getting late and the tour buses were not running any longer.  So we walked to the Metro station and road the underground rail back to our hotel.

We stopped and got snacks at the supermercat on the way back and went to the hotel room to relax.  We were only there for a little bit when I suggested that it was pretty ridiculous to be sitting in our hotel room eating snack foods when this is prime food time in Barcelona and there are great tapas right down the street that I could bring back.

Dominica thought that that was wise so sent me back out to Adriatico to get take away tapas.

I have been seeing the guy at Adriatico a couple of times a day and say hello every time.  He definitely recognizes me.  When I bought food tonight we got a huge discount.  I’m guessing that these are the “customer” prices versus the “random tourist” prices.  Lots of tapas and a great sandwich for just ten Euros tonight.

We had to work on our travel plans tonight.  We decided that we wanted to stay in Barcelona another night so we talked to the hotel but they are sold out for tomorrow night.  Oh boy, this gets harder and harder.  So Dominica books a hotel in Madrid right at the main train station so that we can just walk to the night train from the hotel in two days.  The hotel has luggage storage service which is exactly what we need.  No risk from trying to use storage in lockers at a train station.  That would be really stressful.

So we lost a day in Lisbon but we are gaining a day in Madrid.  So our plan is to spend all of Saturday (the day after tomorrow) touring Madrid on a tour bus.  We will just be tourists but at least we will get to see Madrid which will be nice.  Madrid was not super high on my must see list but I am glad to get to see it, especially after Barcelona was so good.  Madrid is over twice the size of Barcelona and its metro area is nearly a million people larger than those of Houston or the DFW.  It is a massive city.

So tomorrow morning we are going to be packing up and heading to Barcelona Sants, again, and getting the high speed train heading to Madrid.  Dominica did her “night before packing” that she has been doing over and over again on this trip.  Tomorrow morning should be pretty easy – just do final packing, take the metro to Sants – a trip that we know well already – and grab tickets (seat reservations) for the first train that we can get heading west.  It is about a three hour train trip from Barcelona to Madrid on Renfe’s high velocity train.

Today is our primary tour bus day.  Our chance to really get out and see the sights of Barcelona.

While I was out for a walk last night I discovered that there was a playground, just a little one, right down the street from our hotel as a large fountain in the middle of the street.  A perfect landmark and the “official” city tour buses have a stop right there so the location is perfect.  I told Liesl about it last night and she spent all evening begging to go to the playground.  We told her that we would go this morning.  So, of course, she woke up talking about the playground and we just had to go the moment that we could get out of the door.

On this trip the whole idea of playgrounds has really taken off for Liesl.  She has always enjoyed them but she was never into them like she is now.  Now she seeks them out.  It used to be little more than going down slides for her but now, finally, she is into swinging, bouncy horses, see-saws, climbing ropes and ladders and pretty much anything that she can find.  She just loves them.  Anytime that she sees one she demands that we stop.  Fortunately Europe is completely covered in playgrounds.  I have never seen so many.  There seems to be one around every corner.

We walked down and both Liesl and Luciana played for a while on the playground.  Luciana is too little for most anything so she pretty much just follows Liesl around and watches.  She is starting to be able to climb up some things and she likes to go down the slides with her daddy holding her.

The playground this morning was in the middle of a large pedestrian square with views of the fountain.  It is very nice.  The playground is split into two areas, one small area with just a slide, and one small area with a see-saw and some spring powered bouncy horses (or whatever animal they are.)  Liesl and Luciana spent a while on the slide without any other kids around.  Then we moved over to the other side and for a bit a little boy came and he and Liesl did the see-saw together.  Liesl really liked that but she was too little to actually put her feet on the ground so she just rode the see-saw while he did all of the work.

While Dominica watched the girls on the playground I was sent out to forage for food.  I had to just settle from stuff from the supermercat on the square as there did not seem to be any restaurants serving food at this time of day, around eleven, in the area.  Spaniards appear to be, and are from what we have heard, rather peculiar about their eating schedules and those schedules are pretty much unique to them so, as an outsider, it is likely that whenever you are getting hungry that there is no food available for you in Spain.

After the playground it was time to get on to the red route bus and take the beginning tour of the city.  We opted for two day passes so that we could use the hop on, hop off bus routes today and tomorrow as we wanted.  Sometimes that is just the easy thing to do as a tourist.  Dominica used that extensively in London in 2007 and was really happy with it.

The red route took us through the heart of the city and the main areas.  Barcelona is just a crazy beautiful city and, from what we can tell already, the weather is really nice here.  Lots of sun but with cool sea breezes that never seem to stop.  Anytime that you are in the shade it feels great.

Barcelona is a very much alive city.  There are people everywhere all of the time.  Everyone seems to get out and stroll and there are bikes going everywhere too.  It is nice to see bicycles again in abundance as Italy had very few.

One thing that really stood out to us was that the primary language on everything was not Spanish but was Catalan.  I knew that Catalan was spoken here but always thought that it was an “underground” language and also confusingly thought that it was incredibly close to Spanish and figured that someone speaking one or the other could at least understand the other person.  Wrong again, Scott.  Catalan is a rather different language and while it is a Romantic language it is not part of the same group as Spanish but is more closely related to Provencal from southern France.  From seeing it written Dominica and I felt that it is far closer to Italian than to Spanish.  So much so that for a while Dominica was convinced that Italian was being used everywhere.

The tour went well and we got to see a ton of stuff.  Barcelona is what a city would look like if it was built for the express purpose of being an architectural museum.  It seems that every building is something special.  A drab, ordinary, everyday building in Barcelona would be a monument or preserved building elsewhere.  The city of Gaudi does not disappoint.  It will make anyone into a lover of architecture.

Barcelona is also surprisingly green and full of fountains.  Both Dominica and I said that this was probably the most beautiful city that we had ever been in.

We listened to the tour and decided to get off just before it returned us to the starting point where we had gotten on to the red line so that we could transfer to the green line which is the shorter, seasonal line that runs along the sea shore.  The switch was easy but after just one or two stops we decided to hop off and explore the beach – one of the primary missions of this trip to Barcelona was to make sure that we got our feet into the Mediterranean.

The clouds had rolled in and there was a good breeze blowing and for just a little bit it was actually a little bit chilly.  We got off of the bus and walked down the beach.  The beach here is amazingly clean sand and very wide and surprisingly devoid of many people which is truly amazing as the streets everywhere are full of tourists who, by and large, are obviously wearing swimsuits under their clothing.

We walked down to the water.  Luciana was pretty afraid of the water and would not let us take her close to it.  I went down and tried the water and it was pretty old.  Dominica took Liesl and, while she didn’t want to do it, she did let Dominica get her feet in the water.  So at least three of us officially went into the Mediterranean.

The sun came out pretty quickly and the people swarmed back on to the beach in a matter of minutes.  It never felt busy in the least.  There was tons of room for everyone.  We easily had half an acre to ourselves.  But there were people here and there all along the beach, no shortage of people but never anyone in your space either.  Definitely one of the nicest beaches that I have ever seen.

From the beach we walked back towards the city just a little bit and found a Man-go (a chain here) restaurant that does tapas.  So we went in and ate lunch.  For us the standard tapas fare includes patatas bravas, Spanish tortilla and similar items.  Here we got squid and, for the first time ever, cuttlefish.  Both Liesl and Luciana loved cuttlefish.  They ate a bunch.  That is pretty much all that Liesl would eat, in fact.

We hopped back onto the green line and took that entire route until it returned us to the red line.  We transferred which only took ten minutes and after a few more stops were back to our hotel.  We discovered that the red line actually had a stop almost directly in front of our hotel that we had not discovered earlier.

We were pretty tired at this point from all of the running around and being out in the sun so we stopped at the hotel and relaxed for a while and let the girls do some napping.

After a while Dominica decided that she really wanted to get back out and do some more touring of Barcelona.  So we set out again and took the red line from out hotel in the middle of the afternoon up to Catalunya Plaza and from there transferred to the blue route and route which took us out to the northwest and out away from downtown into the outer reaches of the city.  This is the route that includes the Sagrada Familiar, Gaudi’s uncompleted masterpiece that, after 140 years just passed the halfway to completion mark this year and for decades has been the symbol of the city.  This is the one thing that we absolutely had to see on this trip and there it was.  There is no way to describe it or to even show it is pictures.  The basilica is larger than you imagine and is breathtaking.

The tour buses took us to many Gaudi buildings, most of which we knew from travel and architectural studies, but boy are they something to see in person.  Each one is truly a masterpiece.  Like nothing I have ever seen before.

The blue line is a long one and by the time that we were done and returned the Catalunya Plaza it was the last drop off of the evening and the final red bus had already run.  We were not worried as we had Metro tickets in our pockets and without luggage it is trivial for us to walk a few kilometers to get back to the hotel, even carrying Luciana and pushing Liesl in the stroller.  So walk we did.

We stopped off at a little bread shop on the way and got baguette pizzas and some pastries.  The walk itself was quite easy both in that we did not get lost whatsoever and that it was mostly even, level ground.  Luciana ate a lot of my pizza and nearly half of the pastry.  I’m not sure if she was starving or if she just loved the food.

During the walk we stopped by at the old Roman ruins that were the foundations of the current city.  Amazing stuff.  This old city with these ancient buildings right there in the middle that have stood for so long.

We got back to the hotel no problem at all and settled in for the evening.  Dominica doesn’t like to eat and walk so she started eating her pizza now but did not like it (pickled peppers on it) so she sent me out to the supermercat to pick up chips and a drink for her.  I went out and returned shortly with chips and a liter of fruit juice that she drank in no time.  Definitely getting dehydrated which is really easy to do when traveling under the best of conditions and super easy to do when dealing with kids and being out in the sun all day.  We got a lot of exposure today for sure.

We talked a bit and we both agree that Barcelona is the best city that we have been in anywhere. If we were to opt for city living over village living, Barcelona is the big contender.  It is a massive city, about three million, but feels mostly small.  Each little neighbourhood has its own everything so you can live locally, like in a village, but have the resources of a really massive metropolitan area.  And there is so much sun and air and open space and greenery that much of it does not feel like a city at all.  And the people are really nice too.  We are having a great time here.

Oh and the nightlife.  Barcelona really comes alive at night.  Dinner doesn’t start until eight or nine and the streets are full even at midnight!

We did nothing this morning but sleep in and stay in the hotel room in Milan until it was time to head out to go to the airport.  We walked over to Milano Centrali which was right across the street from our hotel, got a light breakfast at the station and caught the shuttle bus that runs from Centrali out to Milani Malpensa, the airport from which we will be flying to Barcelona.

The shuttle took about an hour and the ride on the shuttle gave us a chance to see, by far, the most of Milan that we got to see on this trip. It still was not very much, the shuttle didn’t pass any important sites.  Oh well, hopefully we will see Milan far more often than we event want to very soon.

The airport was mostly uneventful outside of a bit of confusion around checking in to our flight.  We are flying through Iberia but they have us handled by Vueling, one of their partners.  So when we went to the Iberia counter to check in… no one was there but the counter was officially “open”.  There were a lot of people having this problem.  There was a bit of a panic but I took the lead and talked to the information counter and found out that Iberia had multiple check in counters and that the one for Barcelona was in a completely different part of the airport.  That was extremely confusing and having their main counter completely unmanned so that there was no indication whatsoever that we were in the wrong place didn’t help anything.

After that, everything went smoothly.  We had gotten to the airport nearly two hours before our flight so had time to relax and eat some snacks while we waited for the flight.

The flight itself was pretty short, just over an hour.  It is not a long flight from Milan to Barcelona.  I had a great view out the port window nearly the whole time and was able to identify The Langhe, the Maritime Alps, the French Riviera, etc.  Pretty amazing views from the plane.

Unfortunately we had an incident on the plane.  I was feeding Luciana food from our snack stores and she gagged a little on a pecan sliver and threw up while we were in flight.  She has a really touchy gag response, always has.  Any little thing and everything comes up right away.  What a mess that was.  All over her, all over me, into the seat behind us.  Not fun.

Other than that the flight was good.  The seats were very tight with no legroom at all.  It was actually quite a bit claustrophobic.  Having to hold Luciana on my lap in such a tiny space was very awkward.  Good thing that the flight was really short.

We landed in Barcelona and took the first shuttle bus that we could to the city center.  Just that drive was pretty neat, Barcelona is a really attractive town.

We got to the main plaza and then took the Metro from there to the stop near our hotel.  It really wasn’t bad.  The Barcelona Metro is really quite nice.  Clean and easy to navigate.

We got off at the Barceloneta stop and walked to our hotel, the Hostal Nuevo Colon, which was very close to the Metro stop.  An easy walk.  The air was brisk and cool but the sun was really hot.  Bliding, in fact.  The sun in Barcelona was really intense.

The hotel was pretty nice.  Directly across the street from Estacio d’Franca and right on a main drag with tons of restaurants and shopping right outside.  Our room had three beds and a pack and play for Luciana.  We are pretty happy with it.

After getting settled in to the hotel room we headed onto to find some authentic Barcelonian tapas which we have been wanting for years.  We love tapas and we haven’t had good tapas since moving out of Newark and eating tapas regularly in the Ironbound.

We found a little place called Adriatico right down the street from the hotel and settled in there. We sat on the street and Dominica sent me in to order.  She speaks Spanish better than I do but she panics when dealing with things in another language so makes me deal with things whenever possible every since early on in Italy.  So I ordered us some coffee and a ton of tapas.  We were really hungry and excited to be eating real tapas in Spain.

Dinner was excellent.  We really liked it.  From there we just went back to the hotel.  Officially we don’t have Internet access in our room but in reality we do and it works great.  The girls were worn out from traveling so we spent a while just relaxing in the hotel.

Dominica wanted some supplies so sent me out to do some shopping.  So I went for a bit of a walk and discovered that our hotel is right on the water front with ships and the harbor and everything right down the street.  I walked around for a bit completely stunned by the beauty of Barcelona and the Mediterranean.  Really impressive.

I found a small “corner store”, somewhat oddly referred to as a supermercat here, that had what we needed, most importantly chocolate milk for Liesl, and I returned home.  I am very happy to discover that chocolate milk is so popular here that there is a large brand made right here in Barcelona so it is really easy to find.  Everyone carries the local brand and it is really good.

If I ever have to open my own chain of “super markets” in the region I will have a merecat as my logo and call it the Super Merecat Supermercat.  At least no one would forget it.

We had some snacks from the grocery and just relaxed.  The girls were busy playing with their toys and harassing Dominica as usual.  Dominica was very impressed with my ability to get out and find what we needed just walking around in Barcelona.

Dominica also did a bit of tour bus research tonight.  We are just tourists here in Barcelona so our plan is to actually use the tour buses and get out and see the city.  We have no agenda other than to see the sites.  I’m not much into being a tourist but there is no opportunity for us to get into normal life here and there is a ton to see in this town.  So likely we will be riding the tour buses all day tomorrow.

Today is our wasted “travel day.”  Originally we were supposed to only have to go to Torino today, a thirty to forty five minute trip, where we would catch the night train to Barcelona.  So we had planned on having most of this day in Neive to relax and do some light, local sight seeing before taking a local train to Torino.  Or, more likely, we would have gone to Torino in the morning and spent the day walking around the city to see it.

But Trenitalia, for some reason, has taken all of the night trains off of their schedules so we are left high and dry.  Instead we are taking a several hour local train trip over to Milan, staying in a hotel by the train station and tomorrow morning catching a quick hop flight over to Barcelona.  Not ideal but it works.  So today is pretty much completely lost as we have to travel and don’t have the time or energy to unpack everything just to pack it back up the same day.  So today is a nothing day in the middle of our travels.

We got up at a good time this morning.  I went and had breakfast first while Dominica kept getting things ready.  I talked to Christian and Marita for a little bit and we got hooked up on Facebook and with email.  They are heading back to Norway today and are leaving two or three hours ahead of us.  It worked out pretty well that we were in the hotel together for almost the entire week – they got in one day ahead of us – and that we are leaving the same morning and that their oldest and our youngest were born on the same day.  So they were off for the train station in Alba at around nine.  That is when Dominica came down to get breakfast and I watched the girls.  We’ve given up on having Liesl go down to breakfast too.   She is well behaved but eats basically nothing but takes forever doing it.

We got everything ready and were outside before ten to make sure that we were able to get to the train station as soon as possible.  We have a bit of running around to do this morning and our train leaves at five after noon so we want to be quick about getting everything done.  We have to wait for our hostess to return from the train station as she has our baby seat with her so we are just stuck waiting as we need that both to get Luciana to the train station as well as to return the car.  The car has to be returned to Avis by eleven thirty but only with the car can we get to the Alba train station so we have a very serial set of events that have to take place to make everything work.

We had planned to leave the hotel around ten to make sure that we had enough time to make it everywhere but our car seat did not make it back until ten till eleven.  So we were cutting it really close.  We closed out our hotel tab, got the baby seat loaded back into the Panda and were off for Alba as quickly as possible.

I dropped the girls at the train station and we raced back to the Avis shop which is about halfway between Alba and Neive.  I had to run to the gas station to get the tank topped up before dropping it off too which was adding to my panic about the time table.

In the end we got the car back to Avis with about ten minutes to spare.  Nothing like cutting it close.  Everything was fine and she drove me back to the Alba train station and I was there by eleven thirty.  So we had thirty five minutes to relax and wait for the train.  It is a very small station at Alba so very easy to deal with.  The train was already at the platform so we loaded up and dropped off the luggage and I ran into the bar to get our morning coffees to take on the train.  I am starting to really get the hang of getting Italian coffee.

The first train was decently short, just running from Alba to Cavallermaggiore where we transferred to a line running north up to Torino.  Unfortunately our train stalled along the way to Cavallermaggiore to wait for another train that was running late.  But they waited so long that we missed our connection at Cavallermaggiore by about fifteen minutes.  It is pretty bad when a train is late by about the total amount of time that it is scheduled to make a run – so about one hundred percent late.  That sucked.

So instead of having a five minute layover at Cavallermaggiore, we were stuck there for an hour.  And Liesl had decided, at the very last second, that she needed to use the bathroom.  So I tried to find her one at Cavallermaggiore’s station but discovered that they only had the “squat on the floor” style toilets.  I took Liesl in there and not only is she unwilling to even discuss using one but she is actively scared of them!  This isn’t good.  So she had to wait an hour for the train to come to use the bathroom on the train.

Once the train arrived we were horrified to discover that it was one of the really old trains and it had no toilets on it!  This is not good for Liesls!  So Liesl had to ride all the way to Torino without being able to use a bathroom!  Trenitalia is not scoring points today.

We got to Torino and Dominica was able to whisk Liesl right off to the restroom and the crisis was averted.  This was a very long afternoon for Liesl.

The delay at Torino was long enough that we were able to eat a meal there. The only restaurant was a McDonald’s but we figured that some fish, larger than usual drinks and a taste from home would not be a bad thing.  I didn’t want to deal with moving everyone somewhere with all of the luggage so I just got us “eat in” food and we sat down in the middle of the train station and ate there.  Looked weird but it was useful and we were next to a sign so not in anyone’s way at all.

The longest part of our ride was the Torino to Milan run but that part went just fine.  We got into Milan in the early evening which was really annoying as the distance is pretty small and we have been working on nothing but getting there since nine o’clock this morning.  Had we been driving we could have been in Milan an hour before our first train pulled out of Alba!

Our hotel room in Milan was right across the street from the train station in a tiny little urban place.  It was a rickety old building with multiple “hotels” located within it.  Ours was on the first floor and our room had views of the train station so clear that we could see two of the arrival boards, see the occasional train come by and hear the platform announcements.  The room is pretty spartan and there is no bed for Luciana.  The bathroom door has no latch so you just have to hope that it doesn’t blow open and there is only one room key and the room door doesn’t latch so it is either deadbolted with the only key or it is swinging open – that means that there is no reasonable way to come and go unless all four of us do so together.  Not ideal.  But there is Internet access in the room which is nice.

We tried going out for a quick trip to see some sights.  The plan was to catch the yellow line to the city center so that we could see the galleria and the duomo.  But just as we headed out for the evening it started to rain and then it started to thunder.  Dominica decided that since we will be living close to Milan in the near future that it was not worth trying to go see it tonight when we could just relax for a bit.  So we turned around and went back to the hotel room and wrote Milan off completely.

We stopped in the Milan train station and got a quick dinner of pizza at one of the fast food places in there.  Nothing special but it wasn’t bad.

Back at the hotel I had the hotel open our two bottles of wine that we had lugged with us from Neive and we drank those tonight.  I put in a bit of time on Facebook and SGL getting things updated.

This was, most likely, the most uneventful day of our entire trip thus far.  No fun stuff today and really nothing even interesting.  So much for our final day in Italy.  Tomorrow we are off to Spain.  Only two countries left to see before we go home.  I can’t believe that we are this far into this huge adventure already.  It doesn’t seem possible.

It is hard to believe that our little girls have already been to eight countries in their lives (and neither has ever been to Canada or Mexico which would be the obvious ones!)  Tomorrow they will be up to nine and next week they will flip double digits.  Kind of crazy.

I am pretty excited about going to Barcelona.  I have long wanted to see it.  This is one of my big “city destinations” in Europe for myself.

Dominica and I got hardly any sleep last night and what we did get was poor.  Maybe two hours at best.  We spent most of the night crying interspersed with talking about memories of Oreo.

We went to breakfast this morning first just Dominica while I watched the girls and then Liesl and I while Dominica watched Luciana.  Luciana is just so naughty at breakfast that we cannot really handle all going at once.

After breakfast we got the girls ready for a day out driving.  The last two days of long distance driving was neat and gave us a good overall view of the region that we are in and, mostly, allowed us to rule out large portions of the area that we are definitely not interested in.  Today is our final full day in Piemonte and we need to really look at the local area carefully to make sure that we have a good feel for it.  This is our only chance and this was the primary mission of this entire vacation.  That is not to imply that we were wasting time the last two days, ruling out those areas was quite important as no matter how much we might love one place if we were wondering if the grass was greener just over the fence we would be no better prepared to decide that if we had not looked at all.

Dominica and Luciana headed out to play on the main terrace for a bit and I sat down with Liesl to have a talk about Oreo.  I didn’t want her to ask about him, like she often does, and us be caught either having to lie about him or to suddenly have to tell her what happened.  This is Liesl’s very first exposure to death and so this was pretty hard.  She talks about dying from time to time and even yesterday she said that the whale, a plastic ride-on rocking toy at the playground on top of the mountain, had died and she was sad and would not ride on it, but to her death is way too abstract and confusing.  So we talked as best as we could about Oreo.  Liesl and I cried together for a bit but then she was suddenly fine and wanted to go outside and play with Luciana.  We are assuming that this will be an ongoing discussion but we wanted to get it kicked off as soon as possible so that we would have as much time as we could before we return to New York so that there is no chance that she is expecting Oreo to be waiting for her in the car when we get off of the plane – which is pretty much what she had been planning on up until today.

Our driving today is over a very small area geographically but the roads are very windy and you move quite slowly so even going just a few miles can be quite a big undertaking.

We started by heading over to Barbaresco which is very small and right next to Neive.  We took the “back roads” although this can be a very confusing concept in Italy as, quite often, there are no main roads.  I think that Barbaresco is completely devoid of main roads but I am not sure.  Barbaresco was really nice, but really small.  Probably too small for us.  It would be like living in the country with us needing to go into Alba for every little thing.  That would be easy as it is really close, but we are hoping to live in a place where we can walk or bicycle for day to day things like basic groceries.  So we didn’t stop in Barbaresco but drove right on through just looking around.

We worked our way down to Alba, the main city in the region, and did more driving around than we had done the other day.  We got a bit of a feel for the city.  It is quite small for a city, about thirty thousand people, making it very similar to Ithaca including the hills and the wine.  We didn’t stop anywhere in Alba, it was a quick pass-through drive, but we wanted to see some of the different areas in town.  While what we really want is to live in a small village there is a decent chance that living right in Alba will make a lot of sense for us, at least initially, because we will have modern facilities there, can do everything on foot or on bike, can rent easily and can use it as a base for figuring out exactly where we actually want to live.  So we need to consider it and the neighbouring city, B’ra, quite seriously as well.  B’ra is only minutes away and is just a tiny bit smaller at about twenty seven thousand.

We drove south out of Alba and went through Rodello.  This was our first town where we actually turned off of the main road and went into the little town itself.

Rodello was great, but boy does it look expensive.  It is a lot more modern than most of the little hill towns.  It is big enough to have its own resources yet is right next to Alba.  It has great views too.  Probably not an option for us.

We were driving south of there on a big, winding country road where, on the side of the road, there was a gelato truck, just out in the middle of nowhere.  Well, we just had to stop then!  So we did.  We pulled over, there was actually gobs of parking, a great view of the towns that we were trying to reach and a picnic area with granite benches and tables (longevity overkill for a picnic area, I think.)  The gelato was the best that we have had since Boppard although Dominica and I both feel that the shop that we used the most in Boppard, just one block towards the river from the main square, remains the best that we have had all month.

As we were eating our gelato I noticed a Ferrari coming up the road below us and head towards the bend that would bring him past us.  So I walked over to the road to get a look.  Nothing like a Ferrari screaming by in the middle of the Italian countryside.  But, it was actually about twenty or thirty Ferraris in a massive convoy!  I’ve never seen so many exotics all at once.  They just kept coming and coming.  There was even a Testarosa.  Several of them honked, revved their engines or acknowledged us in some other way.  The girls working the lonely gelato stand said that this wasn’t really uncommon.  Only in Italy.

From there we drove out into the country onto one of those back roads and it turned into a steep down hill climb that started to remind us of our adventure on the mountain yesterday.  In reality it was nothing like that and not stressful but had we not done what we did yesterday, it might have been.  Single car width little road, really steep descent, hairpin turns, no end in sight… it was great.  We stumbled on some really cool places and ended up in Sinio which was a pretty neat little town.

At this point Dominica needed me to find her a restroom which is a surprisingly big deal in rural Italy, nothing like in the States where you can always find a restroom, so we attempted to get back on to the beaten path and see what we could find.

We came into Montelupe and I drove on up into the old town on the tight cobblestone streets and found a gorgeous square where we parked the car and let the kids out to play on a really great playground that they made there.  The main village square has tons of parking and they built a “terrace” for the village residents that has some of the best views that we have seen yet in Italy.  On a clear day, a sign read there, you can see the Matterhorn!

There was a public toilette advertised in town but the doors were locked.  Uh oh, that isn’t good.  So we tried the only restaurant in town (we tried to eat there.)  They said that they were full and could not seat any additional people and would not let us use the restroom (Italians are really friendly but restaurants in Italy, by and large, are not.)

We left Montelupe and decided to run back towards Neive and, if we had to, use the hotel.  We could drive around small towns for hours and never find anything if we were not careful.

As we passed back through Alba we decided to try the train station there.  Dominica ran in but there was some confusion about finding or accessing the restrooms so she gave up and we raced back to Neive and our hotel there.  Pretty silly, but it worked.  So we got there and everyone took a bathroom break as we were not going to let that happen again.

Then it was back out to explore some more.  This time we took the main road right into Alba to speed things up.  We went past the Avis shop so Dominica now knows where that is in comparison to everything else.  This time heading through Alba we found a Lidl grocery store which had worked for us a few days ago so we stopped and did some quick grocery shopping.  Finding groceries in Italy is pretty hard, these shops are well hidden, and on Sunday only the biggest ones are open and not very busy – possibly because the people who are most likely to shop on a Sunday are also the ones who don’t know how to find them.

We got through Alba and headed south to start looking at villages again.  Retracing some ground here but attempting to go through Alba via a different path.

We knew that Borolo was supposed to be really nice because that town is both very famous and has the regional wine museum which we really wish that we could have gone through.  We drove into Borolo, parked in the main parking area for town and walked around the old town, up to the castle and around the back streets.  We wanted food but even in a tourist town it is nearly impossible to get food on a Sunday afternoon in Italy.

We found a bar (called a cafe in the States) that was open and serving sandwiches but no pasta.  We really wanted pasta but made do.  It had just started to rain when we got there but we sat outside and enjoyed a soft rain (we were under a roof but open to the air) and ate a light mid-afternoon sandwich there.  Liesl spent a good deal of the time dancing around in the rain and playing with the water that had collected on some of the tables that were not under the roof.

From Borolo we wanted to head for home but La Morra was marked on our map by out hotel owner as a place that we should go and it was, more or less, on the way back so Dominica let me detour there to see it.

We pulled into La Morra thinking that it would be a quick drive-by town but it was really neat so I pulled over and found some parking near the middle of town.  We got out and started walking.  This town really looks to be quite cool.  They had quite a crowd of tourists milling about here and there.  Tourists in these kinds of towns seem to mostly be people from the local area but from other villages.

La Morra was a little bigger than other hill towns that we looked at so far.  They are a bit more touristy as well, but not terribly so.  We walked around the town checking out the back streets, the side streets, new parts of town, old parts of town.  They had several really cool, old churches and a neat little garden with hedges and paths between the hedges.  Just the right height for a Liesl to run through.  So I took her through there and she was quite happy.

We walked up and up until we came out in the top of town where they have a large square.  It turns out that La Morra is the highest point in the area and has a commanding view of The Langhe region.  They have a large platform area to stand and look out over the region with a neat map showing the directions of the different towns so that you can stand there and figure out what everything is out on the horizons.  Very cool.

Up at the top of town there was a farmer’s market still underway.  The last few vendors were just closing down.  One was selling fruit, one was selling cheese and one was selling hazlenut products like cakes and truffles.  So we stopped by the hazlenut products vendor (you don’t get to see these in the states!)  They had really amazing stuff and we bought a bit of it like truffles, honey cookies and a hazelnut cake that is a specialty of the region here.

Dominica has hypothesized that Europeans use hazelnuts in the same way that Americans use peanuts. In the States, peanuts are in everything as is peanut butter.  In Europe the peanut butter thing is replaced by Nutella and other hazelnut spreads and hazelnuts are absolutely everywhere.  Very odd.

We are very glad that we decided to stop in La Morra.  So far, this surprise gem is our leading contender for places that we would like to live and it appears that it has the housing necessary to actually live there.  Many towns look great but would logistically be impossible as there are no houses or apartments to live in so the point would be moot.  La Morra actually has new buildings and old too.  Very well done from a town planning standpoint, and it has great outlying “suburbs” as well.    Hill town suburbs are a funny thing, tiny hill towns of fifteen hundred people with outlying suburbs of maybe fifty people.  Looks really neat though.

From La Morra it was back to Neive and the hotel.  Our last day of sight seeing and touring around the region is over.  We returned to the hotel so that Dominica could get to packing.  Tomorrow we have to leave for Milan.  The evening was spent trying to pack and keep the kids under control until everyone fell asleep.  Much of the evening was Luciana and I out on the terrace with me trying to keep her out of the way as she tries hard to unpack everything as Dominica packs it.

I drank one of our surplus bottles of wine tonight.  Only two left to ship to Milan with us tomorrow.  That did not work out as planned.  Oops.

Our hotel owner stopped by and borrowed one of our car seats so that she can use it to drive the Skaiaas to the Alba train station in the morning.  They leave to head back to Norway a few hours before we leave for Milan.  It worked out well that we had the car seats available.

Another late night tonight.  Tomorrow morning we have to drop off the the girls at the Alba train station, then I have to return to Avis to drop off the car then our hostess will drive me back to the train station.  Then it is a couple of trains from Alba to Torino to Milan where we will spend the night.  The day after that we have a flight our to Barcelona.

The night trains from Torino to Barcelona being cancelled really messed up our plans.  That made for a lot of unnecessary stress and a ton of work as Dominica has been trying to figure out how we are going to get to Barcelona for days.  Very frustrating.  We have no idea why all of the night trains that were scheduled along this route are no longer available.  It appears that the run has been canceled.  We bought our Eurail passes based on using them this way.  So now we waste a day of travel trying to make up for that.

We are very sad to be leaving The Langhe.  We really hope to be back here, very, very soon.

At the end of it all, Dominica cannot believe how well I did scouting out locations remotely.  I appear to have pinpointed exactly where we would most want to live down to just two to three miles in all of Europe.  I had done a lot of homework on this to determine that this is where we wanted to be.  It was no small task but I had been pretty confident that the Alba regions was what we were going to like.  There is little doubt now that this is our target region.