TUESDAY 12th JUNE 2012

BARCELONA

A long and rather dreary drive to Barcelona today. Started out OK through some nice country, but the vista very quickly dried out and for the best part of six hours we saw little but scrappy ranch lands and almost desert! Had a few stops along the way at pretty scruffy truck stops and things didn't brighten up until we got to the coast and the outskirts of Barcelona at around 5.30pm!
We went straight into the city and after having a quick walk along La Rambles (a long, busy street) looked at a couple of old churches - I have to say that I am starting to get very sick of churches - and it was getting very late by the time we headed towards our hotel, only to have Maurizio miss a turn and then we spent a while getting make on the right track!
There was a coach load of very tired and grumpy tourists that finally climbed off and made our way to our lovely rooms in a very nice hotel about ten kilometres out of the city!
We grabbed a quick snack at the restaurant and hit the sack!


WEDNESDAY 13th JUNE 2012

BARCELONA 2

Relaxing start to the day, with a 9.30am departure for our tour to Monserrat, the old church complex on a high mountain about seventy kilometres from Barcelona! We drove through the more industrial part of the city, passed a large iron and steel plant and then the huge Seat car factory! This plant which is part of the Volkswagen empire, employs over thirteen thousand people and produces many types of Seat, Audi and Volkswagen cars!
It was a very steep drive up through a National Park to the complex, but the views were amazing - we could see for many, many kilometres in the very clear conditions!
Monserrat is a tourist Mecca and despite us getting there early there were still about forty buses in the park - apparently when the cruise ships that dock in Barcelona dump their passengers the numbers can swell dramatically!
Anyway, we had a look at the old church and surrounding buildings, before taking lots of photos of the views. There was a cable car down to a lower point and a funicular railway up to the top - the only problem was that we didn't have enough time to do either of them! From my point of view it is bloody annoying that the primary focus of the tour is on history and old buildings, with very little or no focus on the geographical or industrial features of the places we stay or the country we pass through! Mumsie is loving it, but I get bored to death with all the old stuff! It would be nice to at least get the option to see something different - for instance a tour of the Seat factory would have stopped my moaning for days!!!!
The afternoon we had free and some did a bit of washing and then caught the Metro down to La Rambles and had a wander around the shops, where I bought a shirt. We found some markets and bought some olives, cheese and bread, found a bar with some tables and washed the feast down with a couple of glasses of cava - the local wine! Delicious!
We wandered for a while more and then caught the train back to our stop and walked the kilometre up through a lovely garden to our hotel!
Barcelona has been a nice place - not as clean and neat as Madrid but it has a good feel to it - the only place I would have liked to have were the venues for the 1992 games which were down by the waterfront! Once again general interest features have been ignored!