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Spain!
I got asked to go over to Barcelona to speak at TechEd Europe this month. I was in Barcelona for TechEd in 2001, and it's a great town so I was excited to go back. In the days leading up to the trip, the weather reports were incredibly schitzophrenic. One day, the forecast would show all sunshine. The next day all rain. Fortunately, the Travel Weather Gods smiled on us and it was perfect for the entire time we where there. Each day was sunny and high 60's, low 70's. Which is to be expected: Deb is great travel weather kharma...
...but bad baggage kharma. Our flights were to go Seattle to London-Heathrow, then down to Barcelona. The straight-shot from Seattle to London is great. With just one connection, the trip seems much easier. I had packed all of my stuff into a carry-on, which took focus, and was bringing the Ritchey BreakAway that I bought last year, which is a bike that comes apart at the frame so it fits in a normal-baggage-sized case. It's the first time I'd traveled with it. The first (small) problem showed as soon as we got to the airport. I forgot that through London, they're only allowing one carry-on. Period. So since I had my briefcase, my carry on got checked. When we got to London, we found out our flight to Barcelona had been cancelled. So we got rerouted through Bilbao and down to Barcelona. Late, but it would work. Our flight out of LHR was late but we got lucky in that it was the same plane that was scheduled to go on to Barcelona so we made it there around midnight. With no bags. This was a repeat of what happened when we went to France for the Tour last year. What a pain. We traveled on Monday, and the bags showed up mid-day on Wednesday, and looked like they'd been put through a grinder. The Ritchey was still ticking, but took a beating. |
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Barcelona
Barcelona is just awesome. Lots of great beaches, lots of great nightlife. We were staying at the Hilton Diagonal Mar, which was about a block from the beach and a tram ride away from Port Olimpic, which is where most of the action is. We cruised down there on Tuesday night and ran into Freddy Garcia (ex-Mariner's pitcher) at one of the bars. Weird. Over the next few days I had my work at the conference and we tried to get adjusted to the time change, which was tougher than usual for some reason. Anyway, Port Olimpic is basically a time warp. Same thing happened to me in 2001. You show up for dinner at 9 or 10 (early by Barcelona standards), then go out to check out the clubs and woooooooooop, it's 4am. Yikes.
When I started having some free time, we took a little trip up to Montjuic, which is the Olympic complex. There we got a chance to swim in the Olympic pool for a while. It's a massive pool - 50m x 25m - with tons of lanes running width-wise - and lots of people. It was nice to get a swim in. It kicks ass having a girlfriend who's into this sort of thing.
Our big tourist day was Friday. Deb rented a bike and we tooled around the city. It's a very bike-friendly city with bike paths every where. We rode by the Sagrada Familia, then up to Gaudi's Park Guell and checked out the scene. Good solid tourist stuff.
Even though Barcelona is in Spain, they don't speak Spanish, they speak Catalan, which is kind of a pidgeon of French and Spanish but not really like either of those. We also got to check out an FC Barcelona game, which was cool. The stadium at Camp Nou is massive, but not much of a crowd showed up for a Wednesday night game that started at 10pm. Was still fun to see. |
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Girona
But the real highlight of the trip was to come. We had two days booked at the Hotel Historic in Girona, about an hour north of Barcelona. We rented a car and headed up there. As my last post mentioned, Girona has all the charm of Venice without the, um, other stuff. The hotel was awesome, and the old town is a maze of narrow streets and passages packed with shops and restaurants. I know about Girona only because it tends to be the early-season training base for people like Lance ArmH3, Dave Zabrieski, Levi Leipheimer, Floyd Landis, etc. It turns out some of them (specifically Levi and Dave) live in the apartments at the Hotel when they're there in Girona. It was fun to talk to the Hotel's owner about the cyclists, and he had a little cycling paraphenalia shrine in the hotel. The hotel itself was amazing. Inside this old, 14th century building was a hotel carved out of stone and granite. It was fanastic. The Hotel had nice bikes to rent, so we rented one for Deb and did a day ride out to the coast. We rode SE from Girona out to the coast, to a town called St. Feliu, then south along the coast to Tossa de Mar, then back to Girona. Great weather, and it ended up being a 60 mile loop. As always, there's no way to see a country like on a bike.
I thought that most of this area would be deserted since we were in the off-season, but Girona was still busy. Walking around the town at night, it just doesn't seem real. It seemed more like Whistler Village or something at Disneyland rather than a real medival town. The shops would open around 5 and be open until 8:30 and the streets were full of folks looking for late dinner.
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Costa Brava
It was lucky that we couldn't get more nights in the hotel. There was some sort of meeting between the French and Spanish leaders there, and Chirac was staying at the Hotel, so the whole thing had to be cleared out on Monday. So we headed out to the coast again, heading straight east then up the twisty, narrow roads along the coast up north. Our plan was very fluid. The working plan was to find somewhere to stay in Cadaques, but after seeing several coastal towns, we decide there wasn't much variety and the driving wasn't worth it. The towns were all very nice, but very similar. So we just kept driving up the coast and stopping here and there. |
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Collioure
Before long we went up and over winding road and ended up in France. We'd heard of a great place called Colloiure. Oh, it's worth mentioning we didn't have any real maps. Just the little diagram on the back of a Girona tourist map. So we didn't see any signs for Collioure. We just kind of kept driving. Finally we made it, and it was worth it. Unfortunately this town was really slow and most things were shut down. But the town was built around two massive old fortified ports, complete with harbour and castles. And it was nice to be around a language that I (kind of) understood. We found a great little hotel here, and I got up early the next morning and rode about 15 miles down the coast. Lots of climbing...every down down the coast is nestled between two large hills that the road goes up and over. With the exception of going through the towns, there wasn't an inch of flat road. It's either up or down. It was a little chilly early on but you can't beat the scenery. |
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Montserrat
Since we were flying out of Barcelona, which has the airport at it's southern end, we decided to head south early on Tuesday so we didn't have a long trip (stress!) before getting on the plane. As part of that plan, we swung inland to Montserrat. It turned out to be a lot more driving than I'd hoped, but Holy Crap, this was a highlight of the trip. "Montserrat" means "Serrated Mountains", and the mountain range does look like a knives edge from about 50 miles a way. It rises up, basically out of no where. There is a road up this thing (man, the Europeans build roads everywhere, it's crazy) that seemed a better option than the tram. You pick up a few thousand feet over about 7K and you're at the monestary. It was all I could do not to stop the car and take out the bike and meet Deb at the top.
The monestary, um, complex, is very impressive. The main attraction is the Black Madonna which we were able to see up close, and even touch. The mountain itself has lots of little monestaries perched on various cliffs, it's incredible. If you're ever in the area, I'd recommend this trip. It's only an hour or so from Barcelona. |
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Sitges
From Montserrat, we headed to Sitges, a resort town just south of Barcelona. We got a great hotel right on the beach and got situated for leaving the next day. This down was pretty slow too, due to the time of year. We did manage to have a great dinner here - seafood paella - and a bunch of wine. Even so, I managed to get up for a sunrise-run along the waterfront which was good before a long flight home.
The over all planning was kind of loose but it worked out perfectly. Sitges was 30 minutes south of the airport, with no traffic problems. We had more than enough time, and the Avis drop off at the Barcelona airport is stupid easy. Fortuantely the flight home, complete with luggage, was uneventful... |