6th July – Barcelona, Spain

Founded: about 300BC
Rests:  along the north-eastern shores of Spain in the region of Catalonia on the Balearic or Iberian Sea.
Population: 1.63 mil (2014)

This is the 4th day in a row that we will be in a port and doing shore excursions and I think every one on the ship is feeling stuffed and looking forward to a sea day to recuperate. We all think it is mainly due to the unusually high temperatures Europe and the UK is currently experiencing an of course when you go ashore it is go, go, go.
We decided to do a bus tour of the city that didn’t involve too much walking – good move.
Interesting clean vibrant looking city with a lot of unusually architectured buildings. We loved the beautiful wide tree lined roads, it reminded us of Paris and they even have their own Arc de Triomf. The 1992 Summer Olympics opened up Barcelona to tourism and it is obvious by their references that they are very proud of holding those Olympics.
Unfortunately we only got glimpses of the La Sagrada Familia church that has been under construction since 1882 the crowds were humungous but we did see the Columbus Monument and lets face it he was someone very special in my opinion.

We did a bit of strolling around, Nancy had the obligatory gelato and I had coffee. We were quite happy to get back to the ship early and take it easy.

Barcelona has good port facilities for cruise ships with a dedicated terminal but we couldn’t find any wifi.

7th July – Sea Day
We are both still coughing but don’t feel too bad.
It was nice to do nothing all day other than a bit of washing and running into friends at feed times.
As a pre-arrangement eight out of the ten people from our dining table met in the pizza restaurant for dinner for a change and had a lot of laughs re-capping the past few days. We all basically do our own thing during the day and on shore excursions so it was good to all catch up at once, it’s nice that we all get on really well.
Around 1900 we left the Mediterranean Sea passed through the Straight of Gibraltar where the land masses are only 15kls apart and on into the Atlantic Ocean where we have 8ft waves white caps and a cool wind blowing but it isn’t uncomfortable.

800 cruise ships visit Barcelona each year now.