We Made It!

Hello, Jeff here at the Work Center in Barcelona, Spain. Our hotel doesn't have internet access but they gave us directions to this Internet Cafe, which charges 1 Euro for each half hour of connection time.

On our trip, we arrived on time, though a bit worn out after 12 hours of travel. We had a pretty tight connection in Amsterdam to begin with but our flight from Memphis to Amsterdam was 15 minutes late so we had about 40 minutes to get off the plane, walk across the airport, go through Customs - thank goodness for the "Short Connections" line! - and catch our flight to Barcelona. The good news again is that we all made it. The bad news is that all of our bags didn't. We checked 5 bags and only 4 arrived in Barcelona. We filled out the requisite paperwork with KLM and caught a cab to the Hotel Regencia Colon. Traffic was TERRIBLE! We sat in traffic forever and all the while the meter kept running. It ended up taking us about an hour to cover 7 miles and the cost, with the extra bag charge was about 50 Euro. I was expecting about 30-35. At this point I was so tired and happy to get there I didn't fuss about it.

Check in at the Hotel Regencia Colon was a breeze and we were soon in our room - which was nice. We'd requested a triple room and that's what we got. Nice size for a European hotel room, nice bathroom and full size shower. I see why this hotel is one of the higher rated hotels on TripAdvisor. We washed up a bit, changed clothes and then crashed for a nap.

We got a map and restaurant recommendation from the front desk but I'd already done some research on my own and settled on Les Quinze Nits. We made our way over to the La Rambla and did some tourist strolling - watching the street performers and did some people watching. Speaking of that, we saw an old man walk by that was naked...except for the Speedos he had painted over his rear end. I'm glad I didn't see him from the front! We took photos along the way but I haven't uploaded them to my laptop yet so I'll have to post some of those later.

Dinner at Les Quintze Nits was good. We asked for and were give a seat inside along the window so we could look out over the placa (plaza?) during dinner. Out on the plaza were more of the street performers entertaining guests/tourists. We had a variety of appetizers - the cubed potatoes with sausage were amazingly good. For dinner, Susan and I had paella and Katy had a pasta dish. Both were good but not great. We also had a couple of desserts and a liter of sangria. Total for the meal was just over 50 Euro which was reasonable. We returned to the hotel and crashed for the evening.

Today our plan is to get our lost bag - check in on the Disney Magic around noon, meet up with our DIS board friends at 1:30 for lunch, disembark and then do some more touring of Barcelona. I think we'll venture onto the Bus Touristic, which has gotten good reviews from other DISers that have been here before us. More to come!