Fije los Controles para el Corazón del Sol (part 5)

We headed out again Saturday night, this time on a hunt for the marina where Jo and Jase were docked with their boat Reverie (the second Reverie for those who have followed their travels over the past 3 years). Jo had given us very detailed instructions which required a fair amount of walking, something our already sore feet didn't much appreciate. After crossing a huge open arena which looked as though it may have been used in some kind of Olympic event, and walking over a suspended footbridge, praying we were headed in the right direction, we finally arrived at Port Forum to a very warm welcome.

Drinks and nibbles on the boat followed, and we were regaled with entertaining tales of the sea, mainly focussed on the owners and crew of the very very large boats docked right alongside Reverie. (In case you were wondering, Reverie is the boat in the middle - bigger than the dinghy in the front but definitely smaller than that floating city at the back!)

Another great dinner of tapas near their mooring (including the best sausages Bec had ever tasted!), and we had to say a 'motional goodbye to Jo and Jase - but we've hatched a plan to meet up with them again later this year!

The following morning we had an easy cruise back up the coast to Girona Airport. We figured we'd get going pretty early and grab some breakfast on the way up. Unfortunately, we hit the same spanish breakfast issue that we had the day before. Nothing was open - not even McDonald's! Struggling up the coast from town to town, we finally found somewhere that was able to serve us some toasted sandwiches - which were actually really nice.

We rolled into the airport a little frustrated, but our tempers were about to get a whole lot more frayed... First we were told in a not so nice tone that our bag was overweight by about 10kg. Apparently we'd missed the small print on the e-ticket which said Girona's weight limit is just 15kg, despite the fact that Stansted had happily let us through to Girona with our 25kg suitcase. Anthony argued the point but Mr Nasty Check-in Guy was not having any of it.

It took 2 more retries (moving stuff from suitcase to increasingly-stuffed hand luggage) to get it down to correct weight - and we mean correct weight. We got rejected at 16.2kg! Finally we were through and settled down to wait, and wait, and wait for the flight home. But there was one more scare before we could board - Mr Nasty Check-in Guy had taken up a position checking passports and boarding passes at the gate! Would he decide to turn us back for having overstuffed carry-on bags? Anth discreetly changed queues so he wouldn't be facing his nemesis. But there was no unpleasantness, and we were on our way home.

All in all, a very fun weekend away!

Set the Controles para el Corazón del Sol (part 4)

Waking up somewhat later than originally planned, we headed out in search of some breakfast. This was not as easy as you might think - the Spanish like to have their evening meal at 9-10pm or even later, so correspondingly, restaurants don't open until about midday or even 2pm. We eventually found a nice place on La Rambla, Barcelona's amazing mile-long avenue of shops, stalls and entertainment.




Omelettes all round and we were off again, with a to-do list as long as your arm. Just off to the side of La Rambla is the Barrí Gotic, the old town, a maze of little alleys and great shops. I took this picture of Bec without her realising what she was standing next to. Good to know I can find a replacement for just 29 Euro! Hehehe...







Of course, no visit to Barcelona can be complete without a visit to the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's masterpiece which is still being constructed after 120 years. We certainly could detect almost no progress since our other visit 18 months ago - I think they might have added some decoration to the ceiling. Anthony asked an official how long she thought it would be until it is finished. "About 60 years" she replied matter-of-factly. ¡Ay, caramba! I would have thought the mayor of Barcelona and/or the prime minister would want to be the ones remembered for "getting it done" during their term of office. Oh well, hopefully we'll all be alive to see it; we toured the museum underneath the church, and the drawings of what it will be like are incredible. It's going to be another 70 metres taller, with a massive cross on the top with lights beaming from each axis.

Next stop was another bit of Gaudí-gothic, his Casa Milà apartment building on the Eixample, a great boulevard that reminded us all of the Champs-Élysées. We recharged with iced coffees - it was 25 degrees! We finished up with one more Gaudí must-see, the Park Güell (wow - I'm getting a good wēïrd-çhâråctér wørköüt today!) which is a huge garden of his design, featuring lots of his trademark curly shapes and trencadis broken-tile mosaics. Plus a great view back over Barcelona:


We swung back to the apartment in Barceloneta for a bit of a breather - we'd done a lot of walking! But the day wasn't done yet, we were out for dinner with Jo and Jase again!

Set the Controls for el Corazón del Sol (part 3)

After a certain amount of hunting, we located our apartment in a tiny one-way street in the extremely cool area of Barceloneta. The streets are so narrow that we had to park in an underground carpark nearby, which ended up costing us more than hiring the car did! Here's the view from our 3rd-floor balcony:


We felt like authentic Barcelonans Barcelonians Catalonians as we made our way through the narrow streets to the Metro station where we met our dinner dates, Jo and Jase, a couple of buddies from our Agilent days, who are now making their way around the Med on their sailboat. Wow there's a tough gig! We were starving, having not really eaten anything significant since breakfast, so we pulled into the first restaurant we found, and tucked into tons of the good local stuff - seafood, paella, wine and of course, mucha cerveza! Here we are holding the free Sangria cocktails Jo managed to negotiate for us:


We kicked on to a local bar for more wine and beer and stumbled home at about 1am. Viva España!

Set the Controls for the Heart del Sol (part 2)

Our planned diversion on the 120km from Girona to Barcelona was Montserrat, an amazing pile of rock which some monks obviously thought would give them a heavenly head start, so they built a monastery there in 1025 and people have been visiting ever since. Getting up the 1200 metres must have been an absolute nightmare back then, it's mighty steep - the Kalos' 1.2 litre pepper-grinder of an engine only just had the necessary oomph! We would have loved to take the rack railway, but unfortunately it was not running.


When we got up there, we discovered why. The four of us were probably 10% of the entire visitor population that day! Weekends in summer are apparently pretty hectic, but it was really nice and it seemed much more appropriate that it had such a tranquility.





In fact, there were possibly more semi-feral cats than other visitors that day:


With the obligatory church/cathedral visit ticked off - no European holiday can be complete without one! - we made our (considerably faster) way back down the hill and headed for Barcelona, and our dinner dates...

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (part 1)

One of the great things about living in the UK is the super-low-cost flights you can get to weird and/or wonderful places in Europe. When Anthony got an email suggesting cheap flight packages to Barcelona, it didn't take long for a long-weekend plan to hatch. Anth really should be a travel agent, within 30 minutes of deciding to go we were booked on flights and excellent accomodation near the city centre, had Spanish car hire sorted, and also had the Thursday night booked at a hotel near Stansted airport that would neatly cover the car-parking and airport transfer parts. He's a machine!

So last Thursday night we hammered off to Stansted after work (for those that have it...), and on Friday morning we flew out to sunny, sunny Spain. And was it sunny!! About 23 degrees and perfect. We just fit into our Chevrolet KAOS oops I mean Kalos, but only because all four of us were sharing one suitcase! RyanAir charges you for each and every bag you check in, but the restrictions on carrying liquids mean you have to check in at least one bag!

After loading up we hit the highway, but soon hit a snag. On leaving Girona Airport, we passed underneath a gantry that clearly had something to do with tolls. Our ViaMichelin trip directions had also mentioned a toll - but we had breezed through a green traffic light and a raised barrier. 20km later, we arrived at another toll booth. Only this time, there were no green lights, and all the barriers were most definitely down. We rolled up to a machine which required a ticket that we didn't possess - we can only imagine it should have been given to us as we left the airport. But before we could back out and try and explain ourselves at a manual booth, we had a half-dozen cars up our exhaust pipe preventing our escape. And then the beeping started...

The racket eventually attracted the attention of an attendant, whom I shall call Alonso. Unfortunately, although he was able to comprehend our predicament (thanks to Anth's decent Espagnol) and call off the tooting masses, he made one critical mistake. After using his special powers to tell the toll machine how much we owed it, Alonso grabbed Anth's credit card and stuck it in the wrong slot.

Now if I was designing something requiring the input of two things that are exactly the same size, I'd save a lot of potential hassle by making just one slot, and giving that slot the ability to push things out again. Apparently attendant Alonso's cousin, designer Domingo, did not consider this option, and instead provided two identical slots side-by-side, one for the ticket, and one for the credit card. And only the credit card slot could spit anything back out.

Upon realising his mistake, Alonso attempted to extract Anthony's card with folded-up bits of paper, but to no avail. He opened the lid of the machine, but despite finding a rather interesting stash of various plastic cards, Anth's was not one of them. By this time we'd been at the toll booth for about 20 minutes, and were devising cruel and unusual yet highly appropriate punishments for both Alonso and Domingo. I'm sure you can too.

Eventually Alonso waved us on, but of course Anth had to cancel his card, and thus Amanda's too, just in case Alonso's other cousins, credit card fraudsters Carlos, Cesar and Fernando, got their mitts on the plastic. Bugger.

Happy (Belated) New Year

We had a pretty quiet New Year's Eve, Kath came over from Kent to help us celebrate, but we barely even dented the enormous alcohol stockpile we'd set aside for the long weekend.

The night before New Year's, we made use of Kath's two Trivial Pursuit enhancement boxes, but as one was a very UK-centric Celebrity Questions, there was definitely a good box and a bad box being alternated for the questions. Within an hour Amanda had spat the dummy and given up (she is the first to admit she lives in a bubble) but we struggled on for 3 more hours before Kath and Johnny were crowned winners with 5 segments/wedges/whatever-you-call-them each.

The day of the 31st was put to good use with preparation of the four-course dinner:

• Cheese and biscuits (including English specialities Double Gloucester and Red Leicester)
• French Onion Soup
• Roast Lamb with all the trimmings
• Sticky Toffee Pudding with Butterscotch sauce

But more importantly, we introduced ourselves to our local watering-hole, The Bladud's Head*. We have two pubs within about 3 minutes' walk, the other one being called The Harvester and being more of a family restaurant in a pub setting. Nothing wrong with that, and they do excellent food at good prices, but sometimes you just want a real pub where the carpet is sticky, the beams are low and the only thing to eat is a packet of crisps that's been hanging behind the bar since 1983. The Head is that pub. We availed ourselves of some local cider but were soon attracted to the dartboard on the wall. The landlady must have quickly regretted handing over the darts, as Bec proceeded to scar the nearby walls, floor, ceiling, and nearly broke a window, but a bit more of the excellent cider soon got her radar back into line. Anthony also proved to have a technique that improved with alcohol and ran out the winner of our Round-The-World comp, but we vowed we'd return for a rematch. The landlady was unsure whether this was a positive development.

As night fell we took on the four-course meal and won, before sitting down to yet more competitive entertainment. This time, it was a game of Spot The Intro, a great little game Bec had spotted in Bath and bought for Amanda for Christmas. Although a very simple idea (put the CD on and identify excerpts from popular tunes of the last 40 years), it proved to be excellent fun, with the boys running out 2-1 winners over the girls thanks to Johnny's scary 80's pop music facility and Anth's frankly terrifying command of the Elton John domain.

Midnight came and went, with a great view of public- and privately-funded fireworks bursting over Bath, and the TV showing the monstrous display on the Thames in London. With the insane amount of alcohol we had allocated reduced to merely ludicrous levels, and the melodies of long-forgotten one-hit-wonders still echoing in our ears, we crashed out three hours into 2007, Greenwich Mean Time.

Wishing everyone a happy, safe and prosperous 2007!



(*) Bladud was a legendary swineherd who discovered that his pigs' leprosy was cured by the spring waters of Bath, cured his own leprosy, and built the first city here ... perhaps.

Cruise through the Cotswolds

We've been having some quite nice weather (well, relatively) so we thought we'd take a bit of a spin through the Cotswolds, a very cute and picturesque rural area of England that starts just north of Bath. The Cotswolds are famous for rolling countryside and pretty stone villages, and don't the residents know it!

Here's Johnny with a couple of icons of English life, the big (faded!) red telephone box, and just visible on the right, a pub called The Red Lion - the most popular pub name in the UK.

Eagle-eyed readers might spot another couple of typical English sights, the double-yellow lines marked on the street (i.e. No Standing Any Time) and the way the red car behind Johnny is parked "backwards". Legal in the UK, but will get you a ticket in Australia for "parking with the left side of the car too far from the left kerb" apparently!

We stopped for a clotted cream tea (a.k.a. Devonshire tea) in Chipping Campden, one of the bigger villages - really a town because it has a church, but no matter. It was about 8 degrees so it was great to duck into a toasty warm tea shop and down a nice cuppa tea and a warm fruit scone smothered in clotted cream and jam! We came over all pensioner-ish! Immediately after this picture was taken, Bec sat down on the bench, fed the birds and grumbled about young people!

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