This is a journal of David, Cristita, Andrew and Ashley Rumptz we have lived all over the world.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

Barcelona, Spain- Day 1


Cruise day two Barcelona, Spain

Well actually this was days 3 and 4 as I had a bit too much fun on the night before my birthday and we ended up staying in for day two of the cruise. Not that it was much of a deal anyway as I was not to excited about Monte Carlo, Monaco. Sure it would have been fun to get off the boat and explore some of a country we had never gone to but the kids were pretty tired after walking for 4 hours straight the day before and we had heard that Monte Carlo was good for two things shopping and casinos. The first problem was that the shopping they were talking about was for high fashion items and I am cheap person looking for a great deal. The second problem is that I do not gamble, not out of principle or anything like that but I am bad at it and I just end up giving my money to the person- again I am too cheap to do that more than once.

Did I mention the FOOD! I guess that was another reason we stayed on board, it was hard to get off the ship when all the meals were served all you can eat buffet style, granted some stations prepared your food to order. The quality and selection were amazing! I must have gained 20 lbs. on the boat in the 10 days I was there. Also room service was complementary so if you did not get enough at the trough of breakfast lunch dinner- which melded into one continuous meal with different selections- you could order room service 24 hours a day at no extra cost. The only two things that were extra on the cruise were alcohol and soda. And they were so expensive that we tended to avoid them, tended I did not say I avoided them totally because happy hour was buy one get one, hence my trouble the night before.

Christopher Columbus Statue
So the next time we got off the boat was on 30 July at the port of Barcelona, Spain. I have to say I really liked Barcelona and had a great time exploring the first day. We were in port for 2 days in Barcelona.  We started our wandering at the Christopher Columbus Statue (above) which then lead to Las Rambla which was a nice tree lined street with many off shoots in the heart of Barcelona.


I guess I had a better time on the first day because we just wandered around town not trying to see anything in particular. We ended up finding a lot of neat little churches and plazas that were nice and quaint and a bit off the normal tourist routes. One of the first little churches that we happened upon was St. Maria Del Pi. We found it in a nameless plaza that we had wandered into aimlessly.
  

 In fact we found our favorite building of the whole trip by wandering around aimlessly in Barcelona.
The Eyeball Building?
Actually the Palau de Musica was a good second contender for our favorite building on the trip as well. We- ok I – wanted to go in to get a full tour of the Music Palace but the tickets were $20 a person and there was no way I was going to cough up $80 to hear my kids bitch about being dragged through another museum/cathedral - and this was only day 2 for God’s sake!


I did convince the kids to go into the Cathedral de Barcelona, which was nice. It gave us some time out of the sun and they got to see a lot of wonderful architecture.  

The cool thing about the Cathedral de Barcelona was that it had a pound and pen for these swans! It was neat sitting in the plaza of the church watching the swans- granted they got pretty mean to one of their own - those priests need to raise them better.


Well we wandered around for the better part of 5 hours before we found ourselves back at the feeding trough – err I mean back on the boat to eat!

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