Thursday, March 28, 2024
Last night just before bed I realized I had not yet reserved our tickets for the train today. The Eurail system is a bit weird in that for some trains you have to pay a bit to reserve your seat on a train. And sometimes you can do it online and sometimes you can’t. Well last night I couldn’t.
So this morning I woke up at 5:30am and headed into Barcelona (about a 45 min trip) to the train station to get our reservations. When I go there and said I wanted to go to Pamplona the guy said it’s going to be tough because it’s a holiday weekend. Then when I told him there are seven of us he told me that’s going to be impossible.
But after looking around we found a train from Barcelona to Zaragoza and then another from Zaragoza to Pamplona. It was a tender mercy.
I headed back to the house, and we packed up and cleaned up the house a bit, and then we headed out. I wanted to show the kids some more of the city, but Betty has already seen it. So we dropped her and River off to hang out at the train station, and I took the kids to see the Sagrada Familia. We didn’t go inside, but I was able to teach them a bit about Gaudi and some of the symbolism of the church. Then we hopped on the metro and went over to Passeig de Gracia to see La Pedrera and Casa Batlló, two of Gaudi’s best houses in the city.
And from there we went down and got some lunch at the Boquería. Just outside, on the Ramblas, the human statues were out so we went over to see. A Don Quijote statue gave the kids a jump scare we will never forget. Alicia was in tears!
After that it was back to the train station just in time for the trip out.
That was all pretty uneventful.
The weather up here is definitely different. Colder and cloudy.
We are all feeling a bit nervous about the next stage of this. Alicia had kind of a little mini breakdown as we were getting to our friends’ house this evening. She’s just tired and a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of hiking to Santiago. So she had a good cry and then we got to Gorka and Miren’s house, and she had so much fun visiting with them. They are definitely angels for us right now. We are going to take couple of days to rest, and then we will be ready to hit the trail.