Planning for Barcelona

This school year has been incredibly stressful, so I told my husband in November, I need a vacation. The second I got back from Ireland four years ago, I started planning more trips to Italy, Spain, and New Zealand. I've also been learning Spanish on Duolingo, so Spain seemed like the best option. (Granted, we went to Barcelona, where many of the locals spoke Catalan instead of Spanish, and the tourist spots/restaurants spoke some English, so I didn't need to exercise my new Spanish skills nearly as much as I'd wanted!)

We were in Barcelona for about four days. We arrived Saturday night and left Wednesday morning. This felt like the perfect amount of time to stay, though we dreaded the plane trips.

Itinerary

Friday:

10PM- Board flight to London Heathrow with connection to Barcelona!

Saturday:

4PM- Arrive in Barcelona

8PM- 3 course dinner at Cathedral 1951, Hotel Colon's restaurant

Sunday:

9AM-11AM- Casa Batllo tour ($38.03 each for basic Blue tickets)

12PM- Rooftop Bar at Hotel Colon to watch Sardana dancing (this actually turned out to be the Saint Eulalia festival)

1PM- tapas at Bilbao Berria

After lunch, go shopping on La Rambla, walk around the Arc de Triomf and Parc de la Ciutadella

Monday: (see link above)

9:30-11:30AM- Parc Guell ($10.82 each)

1:45PM- La Sagrada Familia tour ($32.60 each- basic tour without the towers)

7PM- Casa Mila tour ($40.90 each)

Tuesday:

9AM-11AM- Palau de la Musica Catalana ($14.35 each)

Afternoon- Visit Castle Montjuic ($9.65 each)/walk around park area

Wednesday:

12:20PM- Board flight to London Heathrow with connection to Atlanta

Click each day's link above for a review of the sites we saw! Keep reading below for a review of travel and accommodations.

I didn't have much planned for Saturday evening, which turned out to be a good thing since we soon found out that British Airways is never on time with their flights. This was the most uncomfortable flight we have ever experienced. We couldn't sleep the whole night- our seats were in the very back of the plane, so there was no way to recline and very little room in front of us. The airline stewardesses completely skipped over us when handing out dinners, and when we asked about dinner afterwards, they had run out and had to bring us some desserts (I think left over from the first class section). On the way back, we arrived in London an hour late for our layover. While going through security, signs told us to inform a staff member if our flight left in less than one hour. When we informed one of their staff members, he acted like he didn't know what I was talking about, and said we'd be fine since the security line was short. We ran all over the place trying to find our gate, and each screen we passed said the gates were closing or the flight had left; as we ran up to the gate, it updated to "delayed 1 hour." Once we boarded, we had to wait for 30 more minutes to take off, and the airline stewardess once again forgot to serve us when we asked for water. We definitely won't be flying with British Airways again after this experience.

Hotel Colon was a good choice for us as most of the staff spoke English. The desk clerks all spoke English well; the concierge spoke some English and was able to answer most of our questions; the maids spoke no English, but we barely saw them. The mattresses in the hotel were a bit hard, but we slept fine and had a balcony overlooking the Gothic Quarter. The hotel restaurant employees all spoke English well and the restaurant had great food. There was also a bar on the rooftop, which had a fantastic view of the Barcelona Cathedral (however, we didn't find a single bar/restaurant that served daquiris or pina coladas; all they had was beer, sangria, and cocktails like gin and tonic, moscow mule, old fashioned, etc.)

We got the Hola Barcelona travel cards to get around the city. This granted us unlimited trips on all public transportation systems, though the only ones we used were for the metro. The metro was fairly clean, nothing like the subway in Atlanta. We didn't ride the buses because we found it unnecessary when there was a metro stop almost everywhere we needed one (other than Montjuic- this was an unexpected adventure).

We also found the food extremely affordable; even the nice restaurants weren't as expensive as those in the US. We tried a lot of seafood, though we didn't like it much; none of it was fried, and it was either too salty or not salty enough. I tried octopus for the first time, and the Crema Catalana was superb.

Price (USD)

Plane tickets: $1144.78 per person (includes extra cost for reserving seats; no checked baggage)

Hotel: $695 total (4 nights)

Attractions: $146.35 per person (see above for breakdown)

Public transportation: $30.33 per person (96-hour travel pass with Hola Barcelona)

Total per person: $1688.96

This does not include food or souvenirs. Dinner was about $40 per person each night, and lunch was about $12 per person each day. We often had light lunches--sharing 2 tapas plates--and heavier dinners. Breakfast was included in our hotel.

Miscellaneous

• Don't forget to pack the appropriate travel adaptor. I've only had to use the UK travel adaptor so far, as I've only visited Great Britain and Ireland. This was my first time using the Europe travel plug. We ran into some trouble at the airport, though, since our layovers were both in London, which took a different travel plug.

• Don't try to pack too many things into one day. That's what I did when planning my trip to Ireland, and it was so exhausting that I couldn't really enjoy it. For this trip, I wanted to focus on Gaudi, so I picked some of the places I wanted to see most and the highest-rated places on travel websites. We found that a small part of the trip was a bust, and this was usually the experiences that we weren't truly invested in, but were highly recommended on travel websites. Research before you go and pick the top 2-3 things that are of interest to you for planning your trip.

• I highly recommend getting the Hola Barcelona cards. As it turns out, the metro card to get in/out of the airport metro is separate from the T-Casual cards. The T-Casual cards also only offered a limited number of trips on the metro. We did not have to use the metro that much, but it was nice having one card for everything, and unlimited access if we needed it. The metro runs from 5AM-midnight on weeknights, much later on weekends.