Leaving Paris & Barcelona {May 13-14}

We were sad to leave Paris, but also excited to move on to the next adventure – a week-long Western Mediterranean cruise. We left our hotel in Paris (definitely not luxury, but clean & functional and we could claim a view of the Eiffel Tower from our room’s window) and took a train to Marseille, where we boarded the “Legend of the Seas”. After 5 days in Paris, it was nice to have restrooms and ice water readily accessible. We lounged around by the pool that afternoon and enjoyed our “free” food.

left: can you spot the Eiffel Tower? Basically in the middle of the picture. And Nate’s sad face to be leaving Paris.

Barcelona was definitely one of the highlights of our cruise. We walked into town from the port and walked up “Las Ramblas”, one of the main shopping streets in town. We found an amazing giant indoor market that had really neat displays for everything. There were tons of fruits that we didn’t recognize, and it was fun to just walk around and look at it all.

Christopher Columbus Statue, and Nate with the boats in the marina.

A side street of Las Ramblas, and the entrance to the market

  

We then hopped on a hop-on, hop-off bus. I loved seeing all the architecture in the city – I ended up with lots of pictures where I have no idea what it’s a picture of, but they are glimpses of the city, and different little things that stood out to me. Here are a few of my favorites (I have several more, but I’ll spare you):

   

And some of our favorite stops on the bus:

Bull-Fighting Arena:

National Museum of Art (the fountains were amazing! They were bigger than they look in the pictures. And yes, there were escalators going up the sides of the fountains):

The Stadium from the 2002 Barcelona Olympics:

(I’m running…)

They were setting up for the X games when we went inside the stadium – it was interesting to see the tires, dirt ramps, etc. all set up

La Sagrada Familia:

This cathedral was started in 1882 and is still under construction – it has never been finished! The architect Antoni Gaudi worked on it until his death in 1926; it is currently expected to be completed in 2026. It was very interesting to see the combination of architectural styles – Gothic in parts, and Art Nouveau in others.

 

Park Guell

One of our favorite stops – the Park Guell was originally supposed to be a housing development and does have a few houses, but the project failed and they turned it into mostly a park. It was also designed by Gaudi (the architect who designed much of the Sagrada Familia) and has beautiful gardens, great views of the city (it’s up on a hill), lots of mosaic designs, and interesting architecture.

FC Barcelona Soccer Stadium

We didn’t have time to get off, so unfortunately the pic is from the bus – but the bus at least stopped there for a few minutes so we could see it. (it rained off and on most of the day, but we were dedicated tourists and sat on the open-air top level all day)

Arc de Triomf

We saw the one in Paris, so we figured we would fit another one in on our walk back to the cruise ship.

 

And the Walk back to the Ship

We were too cheap to pay 5 euros for another bus ride, so we walked the 1/2 hour+ back to the ship. Doesn’t seem that long, but we’d been walking around all day and I was exhausted by the time we got back. We did get to see this cool ferry-for-semis unloading – we figured it was probably coming from one of the Spanish islands.

I started this post planning to do the next day in the same post, but this one ended up really long so I’ll break it off. Next up: Palma de Mallorca.