Sunday: July 13
Barcelona Spain, A Chance Meeting
I had another bad night sleeping. I was wondering whether I would be able to breathe through my nose, but that wasn’t a problem. My problem was just normal insomnia. I don’t know if it was because of my cold, or because I didn’t have wine with dinner last night, or just randomness. I had’t fallen asleep by 2am. Beyond that it got a bit fuzzy, because as usually happens with me, when I did fall asleep, I was dreaming that I couldn’t fall asleep.
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In any event, I decided that I wasn’t up for a 9 hour excursion, so I stayed in bed while Amy had breakfast and left on the excursion. I stayed in bed, although I’m not sure if I ever slept, until just after 9:30. I was guessing that the cafe would be open for breakfast until 10, but it closed for breakfast at 9:30. However, I could go up to Mamsen’s (next to the explorer’s club) and get a waffle, some fresh orange juice, and a coffee.
Interestingly, I sat near Russel Lee’s wife. Apparently, she is quite a bit into genealogy. I’m hoping that I can hook her up with Amy tonight, but that might be difficult.
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I almost pulled it off. I managed to add them to our reservation for the Chef’s Table, but when I went back to tell her, she apologized and said that she forgot that they had a conflict for tonight. So I went back and changed it from 4 back to 2.
The shuttle bus leaves the boat on the hour and the town on the half hour. I wanted to catch the 12:00 bus. The cafe opens at 11:30, so I went there then, scarfed down a little food (I wasn’t terribly hungry), and went back to the room at 11:45. That gave me just enough time to make a pit stop, grab my stuff, and head down. This time, we were exiting into a terminal building very much like an airport. In particular, it had a covered “shipway” that went from the terminal building to the ship.
I had a very short wait for the bus. As we left, our ship was between two other monsters, and it looked almost comically small in comparison.
At the town (actually the “World Trade Center”, I ran into the cruise director, who was headed into town for a coffee. I asked her how far it was to Sagrada Familia. She poked around on her phone, said that it was a 20 minute cab ride, but only a half mile away, so I decided to walk. I figured that I would walk in the direction that she pointed out, and after a while I should see something.
After a while, I didn’t see anything. So I turned on data roaming and pulled up google maps. It turns out that it was a bit more than 3 miles away with an estimated walk time of 45 minutes. I decided to just walk it, although this was probably a mistake. I did see the arc de triumph, however.
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At the church, I took a bunch of pictures of the outside. You had to buy tickets to see the inside, and you could only do it online, through their app. Their app was quite large, so it warned that downloading it over cellular might incur further charges. I decided that I didn’t want to see the inside that badly, and didn’t install the app.
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I wasn’t about to walk back. I thought about a taxi, but there seemed to be a large group of people waiting for taxis. I had noticed, however, that there was a subway stop right next to the church. I checked the map, and I thought one of the lines would come close to where I wanted to be. So I went to the subway and bought a ticket.
It wasn’t quite Russian Roulette as I didn’t pick a subway at random, but it traveled for rather some distance before I got off at the last stop. It wasn’t until I got back above ground and fired up google maps that I realized I had done it correctly.
I made one small mistake, however. There is a large pedestrian walkway that I was aiming for. However, I entered World Trade Center into Google maps, and in hindsight, it took me down a parallel street. I didn’t realize this until I got almost all of the way to the trade center. I was aiming for the 2:30 bus, and I didn’t want to spend another hour in town. I did a quick walk to the end of the pedestrian way, but I didn’t have time to go very far.
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When I had gotten out of the subway, I had seen a sign for the funicular. Next to the ship, there is a bluff, and I’m guessing that the funicular goes to the top. There is an areal tramway that goes from the bluff, over the port, and back again, at rather a high altitude. I’m not sure that I would care for that.
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I got to the bus location at 2:29, but it wasn’t as close as I thought. The bus didn’t leave until about 2:34 or so.
I changed into shorts and tee shirt, went up to the terrace to write up the afternoon, and now I’m planning to find a lounge chair in the shade and rest for bit.
I hadn’t planned to walk for 6.6 miles, and it probably would have been less draining to get up and go with Amy. C’est la vie.
It would have been nice to have located some of the Gaudi houses, and visited them on the way back from the subway, but I wasn’t sure where they were, and I was tired, and didn’t have time to wander around.
There are at least 16 merchant ships apparently at anchor just off the coast. It looks sort of strange.
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It is funny how fortune sometimes hinges on the smallest of things. I semi dozed in a lounge chair, and then I came down to the room to shower, change, and possibly start packing. As usual, the red light on the phone was blinking.
The phone has not been working for the whole cruise. When we tried calling, the handset was silent. On two occasions, the phone rang while we were here, we answered and heard nothing. And when we tried to play our messages, again nothing. We just figured that we were somehow doing something wrong.
When I came down to the room, just for grins, I pressed the “messages” button, and the display seemed to show a message, but I heard nothing. On a whim, I pushed the “speaker” button, and suddenly I started hearing the messages from the start of the trip. Afterwards, the engineer in me thought about the problem. The phone obviously works. The handset does not. The obvious culprit—the wiring. I pushed the connector into the phone, it moved slightly, and there was a “click”. Now, when I pick up the handset, I hear stuff from the speaker. So the whole reason that we couldn’t use the phone for the whole cruise was because the handset was unplugged!
The interesting part was the last message. When I talked with Gail Lee at my late breakfast, we had made tentative plans to have Gail and Russell join us for dinner at the Chef’s Table. I had extended the reservation from 2 to 4 people. However, when I went back to tell her that I was successful, she said that she had forgotten before, but they had a conflict. So I changed it from 4 back to 2. Around 5:00 (for a 6:00 dinner reservation), I heard the messages, and there was a second one from Gail, saying that she was mistaken and they do not have a conflict. I went down to Guest Relations, had them phone her, and we are going to try to see if we can squeeze them in on our reservation
If I hadn’t tried to play the messages, or if I hadn’t been successful, I would never have heard the second message. Hopefully they can be squeezed in. I would be wonderful to be able to chat with them over dinner, particularly having Amy chat with Gail about genealogy.
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It ended up working as planned. The Chef’s Table was not at all busy on this, the last night, so there was no problem. Gail and Russell showed up on time, and we had a very pleasant dinner together. Afterwards, Amy and I saw a little of the Flamenco band, then went back to our room for a furious round of stuffing everything in suitcases. With stuff that we had bought on the trip, our bags were a bit heavier than when we left home.