Carnival Horizon Review: Day 3 – Barcelonafeatured
We were up bright and early for our first full day in Barcelona, and the wind was absolutely howling outside our balcony window. I guess we brought some of the Windy City with us when we flew in. Sorry, Spain.
One of these days, we’ll take a vacation where we, you know, treat it like a vacation and actually get some rest. This wasn’t one of those days. We had 9:00 AM entry tickets for Parc Güell, which meant we were up by 7:00 so we could get ready and get going.
The forecast for the day called for highs in the low 60s, but anything above 55 is like summer weather for this lifelong Chicagoan and so I went with a light sweatshirt. But with those winds? Even the sweater left me a little chilled. We grabbed a quick breakfast of cappuccinos and scones across the street at Buenas Migas, a perfect quick start to the day, and then we hopped into a taxi headed up to the park.
Parc Güell is another Gaudí marvel, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Barcelona’s La Salut neighborhood, which was only a ten minute or so drive from our hotel in Eixample. The park was commissioned by a man named Eusebi Güell, who commissioned Gaudí to design a sort of community within the park, with houses, gardens and gatehouses. And Gaudí did what he did best: he designed a mosaic wonderland of swirling colors and patterns that somehow compliments the vibrant city it looks out over.
We visited Parc Güell on our first trip to Barcelona and got the full guided tour then, but it’d been three years and we wanted to just wander through it solo this time. We booked tickets in an early morning slot, one to avoid any harsh lighting that would come as the sun rose and two, to see if we could get ahead of the crowds. Parc Güell is one of Barcelona’s most visited attractions, with more than nine million people visiting every year. We faced a few crowds from some large groups that came in, but that was mostly exacerbated by the fact that half of the outlook area was cordoned off for construction and everyone was vying for pictures in the same spots. It’s a good thing we went early, too, because the park ended up shutting down early in the afternoon because of the high winds.
After we left the park, we figured we’d pick up one of the Hop On Hop Off buses. We love the HOHO’s because they’re often some of the best ways to acquaint ourselves with the cities we’re visiting and they’re such a fun way to pass the time on a nice day. So we walked down to the main street nearest to the park and, for the life of us, could not find the pickup spots. We walked up the street. We walked down the street. We walked over to other streets. And we saw the busses – plenty of them – but we could not figure out where they stopped. So we scrapped the bus idea (and at €30 a person for a one-day pass, that would have been a pretty pricey ride anyways) and we hailed a taxi. We probably could have saved ourselves a half hour and a lot of wrong turns by picking up a cab outside the park, but there are worse cities to lose yourself in.
The next stop on our list was La Boqueria Mercat, a bustling food market off Las Ramblas. I visit the Boqueria every time I’m in Barcelona. Stephanie hadn’t been since our first time because she had awful jet lag the last time we were here, and she was really looking forward to taking her new camera out around the market.
A guidebook I once read said that the Boqueria was a place where people gathered to eat, drink and gossip, and since those are basically the three things I do best, it’s basically my mecca. Add in that it’s an amateur photographer’s dream with all of the colorful produce and I could spend all day wandering through the stalls, eating cured meat out of a paper cone and snapping pictures of smoothies.
After we wandered through the stalls (and sufficiently grossed Mom out at the meat stalls by pointing out the goat heads and eyeballs and all the gory parts you never see at the Whole Foods butcher), we decided we needed a real meal and headed up the street to Luzia, a restaurant we discovered on our first visit to Barcelona. Luzia serves up brunch, tapas, amazing pizzas and cold pressed juices. We caught the tail end of brunch and warmed up with freshly baked pastries, cappuccinos and the best little sandwiches with tomato rubbed baguette filled with freshly sliced Iberian ham.
Nearby the restaurant was a Carrefour, a European grocery store, and we stopped in to grab some snacks to keep at the hotel, as well as shampoo and a bottle of cava to bring onboard the ship. Most stores in Barcelona shut down on Sundays, and with this coming Sunday also being Easter Sunday, we wanted to make sure we could grab anything we needed without worrying about finding an open convenience store before we boarded the ship on Monday.
Taxi’s were inexpensive, so we decided to bring our bags from Carrefour back to the hotel before heading out to the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Gothic Quarter – Stephanie’s picks for the afternoon. But then we laid down for *just a minute* and the next thing I knew, I’d napped for most of the early afternoon and Stephanie decided the hotel bed was so comfortable she didn’t want to do more touring. And I wasn’t going to fight with her on it because I was starting to feel a tickle in my throat, which I was hoping was allergies from all of the pollen blowing around with the wind because I had two weeks on a new cruise ship ahead of me and I was not going down for the count with a sinus infection.
But with that, too, we don’t really rest much on these trips we take. Even on sea days, we get up early so we can cram as much into our days as possible. We can sleep at home, right? Except I don’t sleep at home, either! I don’t sleep at home. I generally don’t relax on vacation unless we’re on a cruise and it’s a sea day. And even though we were halfway around the world in one of my absolute favorite cities on the only free day we’ve ever really given ourselves to fully explore it? Sometimes, you’ve just got to take a nap.
Later on in the evening, we decided to walk to Balmes/Roselló, a café that Stephanie and I absolutely fell in love with the last time we were in Barcelona. The café was all but empty in the early evening hours and we had the full attention of the staff, who chuckled at the fact that we barely looked at the menu before placing our order and told us they made our pitcher of champagne sangria with extra love.
We leisurely strolled up the Rambla on our way back to the hotel, stopping up on the roof to watch the sunset while housekeeping turned down our suite for the evening. Mom was getting antsy that it was taking so long, but the view off the rooftop of the city out to the sea as the setting sun filled the sky with all shades of pink was enough to keep me absolutely mesmerized.
And the reason it took so long for housekeeping to turn down the room? Because they went through every corner and detail to make sure the room was perfect, including setting slippers on top of linens at the side of each of our beds, replacing the fresh flowers on the bathroom vanity and leaving a box of gourmet chocolates on the pillow. I can’t say enough about the accommodations and service at Hotel Casa Fuster – it was a class onto its own (more to come on our hotel in a separate post!).
With an early morning excursion, we called it an early evening. I spent at least an hour soaking in that ahhhh-mazing marble whirlpool tub and we watched CNN International until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.
