We finally arrived at the hotel about 1 am after traveling since Tuesday morning, just a little bit cranky. The trip to Leon and flights from Mexico went well, however there was trouble from LAX onward.
We arrived at LAX five hours early for our 9 pm flight to London and on to Barcelona only to find out that it wasn’t departing until 11 pm. The agent at the BA ticket counter assured us that there would be time to make our connection in London so we settled down for a long wait – and it was long. Particularly when the flight didn’t take off until nearly 11:30.
Pleasant flight and all. Seating in World Traveler Plus is much roomier than World Traveler (not as good as their Business Class (Club) which has seats that flatten out to make beds…), but nice. However, arriving late at Heathrow Terminal 5 and taking transport to Terminal 3 could have worked except that we needed to go through security screening once again. Even with priority, we tore down the corridor to our departure gate only to be met with a group of fellow passengers from LAX being led back to booking agents by a B.A. employee. Even though they knew that their flight from L.A. with passengers booked on the flight to Barcelona were arriving late, the plane did not wait for us.
(I still blame the agent at LAX who didn’t change our flight to their 6:30 flight for which we were in plenty of time. And would have eliminated this whole problem.)
However, they booked us on their later flight to BCN so we eventually made it to the hotel by 1 am after taking an airport bus into town (only 10 euros for 2 instead of a taxi for 50 euros. Luckily, the city is alive at night and we were able to find a tourist info kiosk that was open and able to direct us towards the hotel.
This morning we were up (not early), chose to have breakfast sitting on the Rambla watching the world stroll past and eventually walked down towards the Plaça de Catalunya, found the office to exchange our pre-paid voucher for the ticket for the hop-on/hop-off bus and spend the day seeing the sights.
Although it was billed as hop-off/hop-on, lines at the more interesting sights were so long, we decided to stay on the bus and take pictures from afar. Between the blue tour in the morning and the red tour in the afternoon, we saw most of what BCN has to offer.
Eventually it was time to take a nap while Michael went to the 1st floor lounge (like England, on what we would call the second floor), where he met several of the folks staying here who would be on the TransAtlantic cruise!
Our evening stroll down the Ramblas (it goes all the way to the port, though we didn’t walk it the whole way) ended when we returned to the neighborhood of the hotel for a 10 pm dinner of tapas and sangria. Yummy!
At the start of our walk we did scout out the travel agency at which we need to exchange our voucher for tomorrow’s (now today’s) trip to the Montserrat Monastery in the hills outside town. Turns out it’s about a 5-minute walk from the hotel. The Praktik Rambla is an older hotel that’s been ‘boutiqued’ up and is very comfortable. The bathroom is to die for! Dark green subway tiles, a square waterfall shower head, spiffy flat, square basin, et cetera. Our room on the third floor (fourth floor in the US) is dead center and at the front of the hotel and has a small balcony overlooking the Ramblas. Quite happy with the location, too – only two blocks from the Plaça Contalunya, sort of the center of the interesting part of town.
Although today’s trip does not include a double-decker bus, instead using a coach and cog-wheel railway (you know how I am about alternate forms of transportation) to reach the mountain top, I’m wearing a hat!
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