Back to Barcelona

Again, we woke up to a gorgeous sunny day.

This isn’t my photo - I couldn’t find a good place to take a picture of the whole castle without standing in the middle of a highway.  That seemed a tad risky.  So a Google search located this one from Paradores.

After a great breakfast, we explored a little more.  I discovered that the church is not only still intact, but services are held there.  

Around back of the church is another deck with more spectacular views.


The deck wasn’t in great shape - several loose and broken boards- so I was glad to see these guys making repairs.


Angular, quasi star-shaped outcroppings at the corners prevented blind spots where enemies could approach undetected.  The 360 degree views were for defense, not aesthetics.

You can see another guard station on the far corner in the above photo.  We decided that John would definitely not qualify for guard duty in one of those.

Having lots of time, we decided to drive through several little villages on our way back to Barcelona.  We saw a very nice stone wall lining the main street, with rusted steel planters spaced along the length, all planted with purple irises (for now).

History repeated itself.  We couldn’t find any place to have lunch.  Correction - when we did see a place that was open, there was absolutely no place to park.  Eventually a wrong turn led us into a shopping area of a large town, and there were both McDonalds and Burger King right in front of us.  At least we’d be able to read the menu.

We didn’t realize that the area around Barcelona was so mountainous.  One particular range caught our attention.

The jagged range was visible for nearly the entire drive from Cardona to Barcelona.

The drive back into the city wasn’t too bad, mostly because we allowed GPS to take us on toll roads.  We hit three toll plazas in about 15 miles.  At least it’s a quick (if spendy) process with a credit card.  There aren’t any people in the toll booths anymore.

We arrived at our hotel near the airport, checked in and unloaded our bags, then returned our rental car.  We Uber-ed it back to the hotel and scheduled one for very early tomorrow morning to take us back to the airport.

We had planned to stay another week, but decided not to -  this is Easter week and Spain is a Catholic country.  It doesn’t matter that very few Spaniards are practicing Catholics - this is a holiday week.  During the four-day Easter weekend, pretty much everything will either be closed or extremely crowded.  We couldn’t get reservations at several places we’d wanted to visit.

So we’re planning a return visit for a road trip through Northern Spain and Portugal.



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