Sheep Guarding Llama

We have three days to see Lisbon with today being the first one and the only day in which I am not working for the office.  Technically I should be on vacation tomorrow as well yet but as I am traveling pretty much all day on Wednesday that is effectively a day off so I will be working Monday to compensate.

Our morning started on the Madrid to Lisbon overnight train where we slept last night.  The girls did okay on getting sleep.  Dominica and I, like last time, were pretty exhausted this morning after having tried to sleep with basically no room at all.  The upside to this train trip is that the time shifts by an hour in our favor on the journey so that we got an extra hour of sleep.  The downside is that the trip is pretty short and we had to be up pretty early.

Dominica woke up and panicked about the time, thinking that it was seven, not six o’clock and that they had forgotten to give us our wakeup call.  But I reminded her that she was looking at her watch and that it does not adjust itself for the timezone and so it was actually six in the morning, not seven.  And then a few minutes later our six o’clock wake up knock came from our hostess.

I stayed with the girls while Dominica went down to the restaurant car to get breakfast.  Then when she returned I went down and ate breakfast.  Breakfast was pretty simple, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and a sausage that I skipped, plus some bread and, of course, coffee.  While I was eating my breakfast I overheard the couple sitting at the table next to mine mention “Upstate New York” and I thought that I even heard the word “Horseheads.”

Of course I had to say something so I leaned over and introduced myself.  They were, in fact, from Horseheads, New York.  So that started us on a conversation for a while.  It is amazing the people that you meet while traveling.

The train arrived at Lisbon’s Apolonia train station quicker than we had expected.  We got off of the train, found the WC and then set about trying to figure out what we were going to do about getting from the train station to our hotel.  At this point we had not looked up where the train station was, where our hotel was nor did we have any idea how the city was laid out.  Kind of flying by the seat of our pants on this one.  After over a month of continuous European travel we are kind of experts at this and we can pretty much figure this stuff out.

We ended up taking the Metro, which was pretty nice – a much smaller system than we have been using recently – from Apolonia to Marques de Pombal which is the big traffic circle in the middle of the city.  That went quite well and from there it proved to be a very short walk to our hotel.

The hotel was expecting us and they let us check in, it was not even nine in the morning, and even got us breakfast as breakfast was being served for another two hours yet.  It is odd arriving from the night train because you get in so early and suddenly you are just “in” a new city without any travel time involved, effectively.  So suddenly we were up rather early and ready for our day in Lisbon.

Our room here is quite nice.  We have a large bed for Dominica and I, a small bed for Liesl and they brought up a pack and play for Luciana.  Our room has a bit of space plus it has a large, enclosed patio area with lots of windows, a table and chairs, a full sized fridge, etc.  Pretty crazy amount of space and a really quirky but nice room.  This will work out really well for us.  No direct elevator access, though, which makes it pretty tough coming and going since we have to carry the stroller up and down stairs no matter what we do even though there are not that many stairs to climb.

Breakfast was nice.  Nothing crazy but the food was good and we liked the coffee.  Good coffee is very important to us.  We met a couple from Madeira – he is from England and she is from China but the both live in Madeira now.  We talked with them for a bit.

Once breakfast was done and we had settled into the room we set out to pick up the city tours to get an overview of Lisbon.  We got lucky that all of the tour bus companies in the city use the nearby Marques de Pombal so we just walked up there, bought some two day tour passes for the City Sightseeing Tours buses and hopped on the Red Line to get an overview of the city.

The Red Line took us through the heart of the downtown district and along the western waterfront.  We got to see a bit of good stuff.  Lisbon is really nice but from the tour it doesn’t have the oomph that we saw in Barcelona or Madrid.  The Atlantic Ocean waterfront is really nice and pretty much no city in Europe has that except for Lisbon so that is really cool.  Lisbon is one of the really rare “sunsets on the Atlantic” cities.  I hope to get to see that before leaving Lisbon.

We enjoyed the tour and get back to the starting point and then got off in the mid afternoon and took some time to do some walking instead of riding the bus which was wearing us out.  The girls get restless on the bus and each of the two runs in Lisbon from this tour company take an hour and a half which means ninety minutes of the girls on our laps squirming, screaming, yanking headphones, etc.  Luciana actually ripped the end off of one of Dominica’s headphones!

Instead we set off to see some of the city on foot – that is the best way to see the city anyway.  We decided to just walk straight down towards the harbour from the Marques de Pombal since it is a nice, sloping boulevard that is pretty much the heart of the city.

The walk was really nice.  Lisbon is covered in a stonework design of black and white (that we were told is a symbol that the city is in permanent mourning following the devastation of the 1755 earthquake that destroyed the city) which are really beautiful and interesting with intricate designs all over the city but the stones are smoother than glass so even walking in shoes when it is hot and dry you risk sliding and falling down wherever you go.  We really enjoyed getting to see them all over the city.  Very unique.

The walk in Lisbon was much like a cooler version of the walk that we did yesterday in Madrid.  It is still warm but not real warm.  Pretty nice for walking around.

Near downtown, if you can call it that, there was a funicular that we had seen on the tour bus.  We decided to just take that and see what happened.

The funicular took us to one of the neighbourhoods up on top of one of the seven hills of Lisbon.  It was really neat up there full of older  buildings but it was really tough walking with the girls, especially with the stroller, so we quickly abandoned the idea and took the funicular back down.

We walked to the big square full of people and cafes and ate at a little place there on the street.  The food was good and we got takeaway custard tarts, a specialty of the region.

From there we walked to the Atlantic water front (technically the river but wide open right on the Atlantic) and checked out the squares there and found the Sunday market where artisans sells their wares near the water.  We did some shopping there for a while and then started walking back.  Dominica was tired so we grabbed the red line bus again that returned us to the Marques.

We got up to the Marques and had thought that we would be able to jump right on to the blue tour bus but it turns out that even though the official start of summer is only a few days away it is actually the winter schedule that the tour buses are running on so there is no blue line bus running yet tonight.

So we returned to the hotel for a while.  We relaxed a bit and then I went out in search of food.  I quickly discovered that there was actually a minimarket (funny enough the world minimercata in Portuguese is the exact same thing as a supermercat in Spanish – I think that something is lost in translation as these things are half the size of the quick mart at a normal American gas station) right next door and several restaurants on the corner!  We had no idea.  We thought that we were on some really quiet back street.  Lisbon is a hard town to read.

So while Dominica got the girls ready to go out I ran to the minimarket and picked up some supplies.  They had chocolate milk so we are saved.  Keeping Liesl stocked with chocolate milk is a major job while on vacation.  I got chips, drinks, etc.  Pretty good haul.  Really nice that we have a real fridge at this hotel.  That makes so many things so much easier when you have little ones.

I got back to the hotel and we all went down to the corner for dinner. They had a nice little esplanade out on the street so we sat there and we did our best to order some traditional Portuguese dishes.  We ended up with fried salted cod which had a ton of bones in it.  Everywhere in Europe eats fish with loads of bones.  It makes it so hard to eat here as an American unused to dealing with bones regularly.  Much like how they serve olives with the pits in them on everything.  Nothing like eating pizza and finding a whole olive on it – what are they expecting you to do with that?

Dinner was pretty good.  The girls were restless by the end so it was back to the hotel and off to bed.  This is the end of my vacation tomorrow, while we are still in Europe, I am back to work.  Only a few days left before we return to New York too.  It is so hard to believe that we are now in our final stop in Europe.  This is it, no more trains, no more hotels, no more switching locations.  The luggage has survived, just barely – nearly all of the zipper pulls have ripped off and the one piece of luggage is so scratched up that it cut my leg up pretty badly when I bumped against it and everything is looking pretty worn but they will be making it home with us.  No more new languages.  No more giving passports to hotels.  We are wrapping things up.

And maybe the most stressful thing – no more desperately searching for Internet access!

On this trip we have been to nine countries now.  Each of our girls have been to a total of ten different countries in their lives: America, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal in that order.  Additionally they have been to regions on par with national status such as England, The Alsace, Bavaria, Venetia, Tuscany, Piedmont, Catalunya, etc.  They have experienced several primary languages: English, French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese plus several closely tied languages like Alsatian, Bavarian, Swiss-German, Austro-Bavarian, Piemontese, etc.  Pretty amazing.  We truly have had a survey of western Europe.  The girls even got to hear a bit of Norwegian in two different regional accents!

First day in Lisbon is done.  Tomorrow we will be doing the blue line bus tour and hopefully seeing more of the city.  We will be fighting again, like we did several weeks ago, to squeeze in all of our sight seeing before three thirty rolls around when I need to work.  That is an hour less time per day than we have had since being in Europe because we are back to being one hour closer to home now.  Portugal is on the same time zone as the UK.

Today is our one day, and not even quite a full day, in Madrid, the largest city in Iberia and the third largest city in Europe with over six and a half million people in the metro area making it quite a bit larger than Houston, Philadelphia or the DFW.

We got up around eight this morning. The sun is so bright here in Madrid. Luciana was the first one up and demanded that I get up with her. Liesl was really cute passed out between Dominica and my pillows.

I got up with Luciana but it was only about fifteen minutes before Dominica was up too. This morning the task is to finish packing up the hotel room, drop off the luggage with reception and spend the day touring Madrid. We did not see any of Madrid last night but we had a good time relaxing and we needed the downtime in a nice, low stress location and Madrid really did it for us.

Tonight we are spending the overnight on the night train, our second one on this trip, so we knew that it was important to have our packing all in tip top shape and to be all showered as late as possible as we will not be able to shower again until we get to our hotel in Portugal which might not be until tomorrow afternoon. Maybe there will be a shower on the night train but we have to be prepared that there might not be.

We stayed in the hotel till around ten after eleven. Even so, today is going to be an exhaustingly long day for us as our train to Lisbon does not leave Madrid’s train station until nearly ten thirty tonight.

Once out of the hotel we walked to the train station and got some food there as that is nice and easy. We got tortilla (that is Spanish tortilla which is nothing like Mexican tortilla) and ensalada russa. We are addicted to ensalada russa and will be working hard to introduce it in the States once we return.

We stopped by Madrid’s tourist information booth at the train station and they set us up with information on the city’s bus tours and directed us to take the Metro back down to about where we were yesterday. Depressing that we have to cross the city again my Metro but at least it is super easy, and cheap, and we know exactly how to do it and where to go. We really like the subway systems in Spain. They are some of the best that we have ever seen.

We hoped the L1 metro and were back down to Atoche in no time. We popped out of the Metro in front of a Dunkin Donuts and Dominica demanded that we get some iced coffee. Madrid is not burning hot but it is rather warm and she really misses American coffee. So in we went and out we came with two iced coffees and four donuts. Two dulce de leche donuts for Dominica and I and two regular vanilla iced donuts with rainbow sprinkles for Liesl, our “rainbow sprinkles” girl.

From the Metro stop it was hardly a walk at all to get to the tour bus. We bought our tickets on the bus and were off to see Madrid on “Line 1” or the “Red Line.”

Madrid is a really nice city but from a tourist perspective it is nothing like Barcelona. Barcelona is people everywhere, tons of restaurants and eateries and something to see at every turn. Madrid is beautiful and must be a wonderful place to live but there is much less to see and the city itself is far less interesting than its sister to the east.

Still the bus tour was interesting and there was a lot to see. Madrid really is a lovely city. Great parks and fountains and wide boulevards and some really impressive buildings. We are very sad that we are right here at the Prado but cannot go in to check it out because the girls cannot handle going to any museums, especially not one like that.

After the bus tour we got off a the first stop, at the Prado, and went to switch to the second line, the blue line.  When we did that we noticed that there were some artists selling artwork in the park there.  We stopped and checked some of it out and ended up buying a number of painting to take back for our house in Texas.  We have been wanting real artwork for a while and were never able to find what we were looking for.  This artwork is perfect as it is Don Quixote themed and, more or less, is reminiscent of the paintings that my aunt did that I grew up with.  We resisted getting bull and toreador paintings although that would have been hilarious, my childhood considered.

After we bought our paintings – we bought enough that the painter gave one to Liesl for free – we hopped on to the blue line and rode the entire circle from and back to the Prado.  It was a lot of bus riding today.

After finishing the two bus runs we decided that we would just try walking the city.  That has worked well in other cities and if we spent the remainder of the day walking towards our final destination, Chamartin Station, then if at any point we just wanted to call it a day we could hop on the Metro and be there in a matter of minutes.  So best to get some exercise.

So we walked through the middle of the city.  It was pretty warm but not too bad.  We knew that there was likely going to be a nice playground for Liesl along the walk pretty quickly as we had seen one or two from the buses and we were right.  Almost immediately there was a playground in the middle of the park.

We stopped and the girls played in the playground for a bit.  Liesl loves to run from playground item to playground item trying every one of them out.  Luciana likes to try to climb the slide up the slide portion and makes me help her slide down over and over again.

There were a number of really nice fountains and gardens along the walk as well.  It did not take long before Liesl was too tired to walk on her own and so we had to resort to carrying one or the other of the girls.  We cannot wait until they are able to propel themselves – what a difference that will make for trips like this.  Carrying the girls and the girls’ supplies are what really wear on us physically.

We made it a long way through the city and then stopped at a Spanish sandwich shop and got lunch.  Lunch was excellent, really good sandwiches and salads.  I love the European “half sandwich” mix and match thing here.  You get more variety without so much food.  I always eat too much not because I need the volume but because I was to try lots of different things.  Here they plan for that and accommodate you far better.

We walked a little further but Dominica’s feet were starting to hurt so we called it a day and took the Metro the last little bit to the main station.  We arrived with about two and a half hours to kill.  Most of that time was spent with one or the other of us, mostly me, chasing Luciana through the train station.  She was determined to run everywhere.  She has just moved from walking to short sprints in the last day.

For some reason the track from which our train was going to leave did not post until ten minutes before the train actually had to leave. That is pretty annoying for those of us sitting there for hours watching the board, trying to be ready.  And for an overnight train it would be good to have some warning.  As it was it was really difficult to make it to the train given so little time and so much luggage.

We got onto the night train without any problem.  This train is quite a bit more modern than the one that we took out of Vienna on the OBB and is much better designed.  The cabin has much more space and is more usable.  We feel safer in this one and can move around as needed.

Our train pulled out of Madrid at twenty five after ten.  A late night for just getting on to the train.  Luciana was way past being ready to go to bed.

It takes nearly an hour to get situated on the overnight trains.  There is just no getting around that.  Getting all of the luggage in place, getting dressed for bed, finding everything, getting the kids ready… it all adds up.  On the Renfe overnight the bar and restaurant cars are open until two in the morning for dinner and cocktails and they open again at six in the morning for breakfast!  Pretty impressive.

The restaurant car is a real, nice restaurant with a great looking menu. Dominica sent me to the bar to get snacks.

It was probably after midnight when we got to bed and many hours later when we fell asleep.  We cannot open the window on this train but we do have marginally working air conditioning.  Of course the A/C controls are unreadable and Dominica accidentally covered up the air intakes for the A/C which did not help it at all.  So it was struggling to keep up with the four of us that one room.

Today we are travelling from the Catalan region of Spain to the Castilian region (which is what most people identify as “Spanish.”)  From Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain to Madrid, the largest.

Our morning was packing, checking out and heading northwest on the Metro from Barceloneta to Barcelona Sants.  We made an attempt on this trip to find a way to get from one to the other with a minimal number of stairs by looking for transfer points that have elevators.  That turned into a disaster and ended up with us doing easily three or four times as many stairs as we would have just taking the shortest route.

It is really hard to describe just how difficult it is doing any number of stairs when we have the kids and the luggage.  Liesl needs to ride in the stroller so it takes two people just to move the stroller.  The luggage weight in at not that far off from seventy pounds and is quite awkward so it has to be carried alone as well.  So this normal results in me running up or down a flight of stairs, stashing the luggage in a corner and then racing back to help get Liesl with Dominica (who is normally wearing Luciana.)  We have no means of doing this without leaving our luggage sitting somewhere while we move the girls.  It is really bad.  Elevators are really critical to traveling this way.  We can make do with escalators as we have mastered that but almost nowhere in Europe has down escalators and up ones only once in a while.

We finally got to Sants and tried to get a ticket on the noon train (it was about ten to eleven when we got to the station) but the noon run was sold out, both first and second class.  So we had to settle of the one o’clock train but that one had first class available.  So not too bad at all.  This would give us some time to sit and relax before taking the train.  Two hours is not a long time to kill when there is food and shopping to do and boarding takes place at least half an hour prior to departure.  Two hours will fly by just like it does in an airport.  Trains go between Barcelona and Madrid every hour, on the hour.  Very nicely done.  As Spain’s two main cities I am sure that the traffic level between the two is really crazy and considering that they have a direct, no-stops, high speed train going between them I doubt that there are many flights at all between the two as there is little point.  With the headaches of flying it is hard to imagine that a plane can keep up with the train at all.  It a plane is faster, it can only be by a few minutes.

We grabbed some lunch and relaxed.  The cafeteria had some really good stuff including ensalada russa – the “Russian salad” that we have discovered in Europe and love so much.  Dominica will be attempting to recreate that as soon as we return to the States.  The coffee was really good too and Dominica is really glad to be in a country where cafe con leche is the standard drink rather than espresso.

We also hit the shop where we bought the toys for the girls yesterday.  Liesl woke up yesterday after we had bought her the little plastic Oreo and was really upset.  We aren’t sure exactly what happened.  Maybe Dominica was wrong that this was the dog that Liesl wanted.  Maybe Liesl was upset because it reminded her of Oreo.  We were very lost.  But in any case, Liesl was really upset and really wanted a dog that did not look like Oreo.  So as this is specifically an Oreo issue and it has gone on for two days we indulged her and got her a little white poodle and she was very happy after that.  We will probably never know if this was a ploy to get a new dog toy or if she is really upset about Oreo or what.   It is just a tiny, plastic dog so whatever – this time.  Luciana still loves her stuffed toys from yesterday.  We have new favourite toys.

Renfe actually has a boarding process much more like a flight than a train.  You wait at the gate and go through an x-ray machine with your luggage – although it is a trivial exercise and not stressful like an airport.  Then they check you in as you go through the gate rather than coming around to your seats and checking your tickets.  This seems much more efficient.  And it keeps there from being crowds trying to push onto the train.  It was very relaxed.

The Renfe high velocity train was very nice.  Because it is a full train with reserved seats and because there are no “table” seats we were stuck with the four of us sitting in just two seats which is less than ideal.  But Renfe first class is very nice with tons of leg room, power for every seat, on board movies and radio stations and dinner is included.  Very nice.

The on board movie was “X-Men Origins” or something like that.  I’m not much of an X-Men fan which makes it hard to follow the storyline even when watching the movie in English since I don’t really know what is happening in general so I think that I did pretty well as I pretty much was able to watch the movie.  I didn’t listen to it and just watched it with the Spanish subtitles on.  My reading comprehension of Spanish is way, way above my listening comprehension.

The meal service was good but the only meal was lasagna with meat so we had to skip the main course.  Maybe if we had known to say something ahead of time and had booked more than an hour in advance we could have had vegetarian, we don’t really know.  Spain is a very meat-centric food culture.  What food we were able to eat was quite good.  And there were free drinks, coffee, etc.  Very nicely done.  This explains why the seat reservation price is so high.

The train moves fast hitting 150 km/h almost immediately and climbing to over 300 km/h for much of the trip. You just whiz through the arid country side. We were very interested to see the open countryside of northeastern Spain as we really had very little idea of what it was actually like.

Much of Spain actually looks a lot like Texas.  The landscape was pretty varied and interesting.  Very brown, hot and dry.  The train showed the currently exterior temperature as we traveled and we were able to watch the temperatures climb from warm but pleasent in Barcelona to nearly one hundred degrees in the middle of the trip.  Fortunately it was back down to something nice by the time that we got to Madrid.

We arrived in Madrid at about three thirty.  We are very impressed with the Spanish Renfe trains.  Riding the train in Spain definitely the way to go to get around.  Texas should take note as they have much in common.  Unlike in Italy where there are tunnels everywhere to take the trains through the mountains, the trains in Spain run mainly on the plains.

We arrived in Madrid’s Atoche station which was huge and incredibly impressive.  The entire railroad complex was mindbogglingly large.  We took the Metro (line 1) to run us from the Atoche station where we had arrived in from Barcelona to the other train station, Chamartin, which is where we have our hotel and from where we will be taking the night train (tren hotel) tomorrow night to Lisbon.

The Metro was quick, cheap and easy.  Clean and well lit, very easy to use.  All train transport in Spain seems to be really good.

Once at Chamartin we just had to pop up and do some map navigation to find our hotel, the Tryp Chamartin, which was right across the street.  We were very glad that the hotel was so close.  It is literally right across the street.  This is our third hotel located directly next to a train station.  These are very handy.

I had not realized that the Tryp was a part of the Wyndham chain.  This turned out to be an extremely nice hotel.  Our room was great.  Dominica has scored again and again on finding us great accommodations.   This hotel is so comfortable and has room service so we decided that tonight is going to be a total “relax” night and we are not going to leave the hotel at all.  We will save seeing Madrid itself for tomorrow.

Dominica did some laundry in the hotel room and when she was done I took Liesl down to play in the hotel’s playground area.  Liesl spotted the playground from our twelfth floor (room 1205) window and asked me to take her.  She has done very well today so that was no problem.  It was a tiny playground with just a slide, teeter totter and a bouncy horse.  There were no other kids there or at the pool and the playground had not been mowed and so the grass there had gone to seed.  It only took a minute before my sandals were full of the seeds and I realized that this grass was like little knife blades and I had to extract seed pods that were like huge wood splinters driven deep into my skin.  It was really painful.

Between the desolation, lack of kids, painful grass and boring things to do Liesl only put in about ten minutes before she declared that she was done and just wanted to go back up to the hotel room.  I was happy to oblige.

We decided to just get room service.  There is a service from the hotel and the Spanish chain Telepizza to be able to get pizza and pasta delivered right to the hotel room and that seemed like a good idea so we tried to do that.

We had a bit of a fiasco attempting to order dinner.  The Telepizza information in our room said that food was available anytime after 13:00 but when I went to the desk to place the order (thinking that doing it in person in English would be far easier than trying to understand each other over the phone) at 19:30 they told me that we could only place orders from the phone in the room and that they were only open after 18:30 (which was pretty confusing since that was an hour before the time that it already was.)

So back up to the room and I called down immediately just to be told that they did not open until 20:30.  Argh.  Okay, so now we just have to wait for an hour and then try again.

While we waited we turned on the television in the room and they have the Disney Channel so Liesl was content to just sit and watch that all evening.  In reality it is probably really good downtime for her although having her exposed to commercials is driving us crazy as she wants to buy everything that she sees.

At 21:00, High School Musical came on which was perfect as I have never seen it.  So this was my chance to actually see it while trapped in the hotel room for the night.

At 21:30 I called down to order the food.  This time I was told that I could only place the order in person – which of course conflicts with what I was told when I tried to do just that.  So down to the desk again.  I got to the desk and they told me that I couldn’t come down and that only calls over the phone would be accepted – but then the other person at the desk realized what was said and said that she had just told me to come down because it couldn’t be done over the phone (now, days later as I write this update, in retrospect I am pretty sure that the time being quoted for Telepizza to open was from the person who also thought that the orders had to be done over the phone and was thinking of the wrong service entirely as the hotel’s own room service from its own restaurant does open at the time that he had stated.)

So finally we were able to place a food order after over an hour of trying and four discrete ordering attempts.  Dominica and I each got a pasta item and we got a lasagna pizza for the family to share.

The food arrived about halfway through the movie.  It was actually quite good.  The pizza especially was quite delicious.

We all, expect Luciana, ended up staying up until well after midnight.  Liesl snuck into bed with Dominica and I are watched several Disney shows after High School Musical was over and even got in an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos (can you believe that this show has existed for the past decade since the advent of YouTube?)

Tomorrow we are sightseeing in Madrid most of the day and heading off to Lisbon at night.  We are getting very close to the end of our European adventure.

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!