Up bright and shiny on the 29th I headed out to take the girls to camp before picking up Doug and Beth on our way to Baltimore to meet up with Kirk. Our flights were all on time and things went quite smoothly getting into Barcelona first thing on the 30th. We quickly dumped off our luggage at the hotel, and even got our rooms right away.

I've got to say a few things about the hotel. We stayed at the B Hotel in Barcelona, it did seem a bit older on the inside than I expected, but it was a quaint little place. The halls upstairs were strikingly dim. Maybe it's because people couldn't figure out how to turn on the lights. We had to laugh at ourselves a few times in trying to figure out the lights which not only required our room key to be in a slot, but also relied on individual buttons that didn't operate as what we all felt was intuitive. Once the lights were on we quickly realized that the configuration of the room would allow for the individual in the shower to give the folks in the room itself quite the show! Thank goodness for the louvered slats that we eventually figured out how to operate.

I'll also preface by stating that we didn't see anywhere NEAR all of the things on our wish lists in any of the stops, so I'll focus on just covering what we did get to. We opted to use the hop on hop off bus to see more of Barcelona, which was quite wise since we were all pretty sleepy. We headed to the Gotic quarter for a walking tour and a visit to the Picasso museum. We also jumped off at the Famalia Sangrada for some photos. I was impressed with the level of detail on this church.

The HOHO did a good job of passing other points of interest to help us pack in some extra sights in our limited time. As the sun began to dim and most of our group fought off the head bob that signals a desperate need for sleep we headed back to the hotel and off for some tappas for dinner before crashing out.