It didn’t seem fast at the time…

But, somehow, we’re getting ready to go to the airport, leave Barcelona, & head for France!Once we arrive at our usual digs in Paris (but AFTER purchasing some staples, and some baguettes to satisfy our family-wide cravings), I will try to collect some images into a picture essay, and write some more stuff.

It’s been an incredible trip, though. This was our third attempt at visiting– the previous two trips were denied by a Air Traffic Controller strike and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, respectively– and it was worth the wait. We think probably better for it, actually, as we would not have been able to stay so long, or take day trips away from the city, had we come before.

I should tease that we have images and thoughts from: Figueres, where we went to see the ultimate Dali Museum; Girona, where we walked the medieval city, down the steps of the sept like Jaime Lannister; and Montserrat, where we watched the clouds lap like a sea against the mountains BELOW us.

Like I said, so many incredible things.

We weren’t prepared for the beauty of the narrow streets in the Gothic Quarter– and, we weren’t prepared for the constant shifting of glasses required for walking from dark, cool street into blazing sunlight & back again.

We thought we were prepared for how much good wine there would be (we actually weren’t– SO MUCH good wine)– we weren’t prepared for buying water all the time, like the locals do, because (though healthful), no one seems to like the taste of the tap water.

We had no idea that the city would have such a fantastic array of cooking smells– a United Nations of cooks and cuisine, walking down those narrow streets– and certainly no idea that a city of this age would have such a crazy sewer system, offering it’s own melange of smells infrequently, but sometimes staggeringly. I read that the layers of drainage are so old that some sections are unmapped, and that 50% of the system is unenterable by humans, because of size restrictions. However, with typical Barcelonan innovation, they have a project developing robot workers to explore and correct the situation.

All in all, an incredible trip– I WILL WRITE MORE!