Don’t worry folks – you’re almost done. I have almost run out of days in Barcelona to write about. In fairness, if you feel like you might scream if you have to look at any more of my holiday pictures you will have to take that up with French Air Traffic Control. If it wasn’t for them I’ve have made it back home on Day 3, quietly seething at the loss of my Cava and Rioja and lamenting about the skirt, and these posts would be long forgotten by now. I’d have already moved on to complaining about this freakish weather we’ve been having (it snowed today people. Snow, at the end of April for heaven’s sake) by now, and fantasising about going on holiday again and these endless streams of photos would have been a thing of the past. I probably would have still been lamenting that skirt though, but you can’t have it all. Unluckily for you though, they DID go on strike, and now you get to settle in for one more days worth of happy snaps!
So, picking up from where we got to last week, after being delivered the very welcome news by our insurers that alternative arrangements would be covered we made the decision to head back into the city and find a bed for the night – it was clear we wouldn’t be getting back to the UK that night. We lucked out and managed to find somewhere affordable pretty quickly and thus began a frantic search for a new route home. It took a couple of hours for us to to cotton on to the fact that at 8pm on a Sunday on the Continent you weren’t going to get to speak to a real live person, no matter how many help desks you try calling, so we finally threw in the towel, wrote this post and tried to stop worrying long enough to get a good nights sleep. We rose early and continued with the search, realising quite quickly that we clearly weren’t the only ones in the same boat, because every flight we managed to find sold out before we could even enter any card details. Eventually we managed to get ourselves booked onto a rather epic train journey kicking off the following morning, and after a few brief moments of relief, panic set in again.
It was at this point, you see, that it dawned on me that I was not going to be back at work until Wednesday morning. Now, for most people this would have induced lots of OH HELLS YEAH kind of sentiments, but not me, because I am a chronic procrastinator. So OF COURSE there was an urgent task that needed to be done today that I had left to the last minute, and as always I’d convinced myself that I was the only person in the world who could possibly complete this task. It also didn’t help that the new boy I was there with was someone I met at work, and other than my sister, and my boss who we’d thankfully told the day before we left, no-one officially knew we were seeing each other. So yeah. BUSTED. Luckily I’d brought my work phone with me (erm yeah. I know) and after a memory stick was delivered to the office (thanks Dad!) and a couple of phone calls to my team I finally succumbed to the idea of an extra day of holiday.
Apart from, you know, being in Spain while everyone else is busy working, there were a few upsides to this extra day. Firstly, I got to do more shopping starting with a trip around a local market and ending in a dash to Zara to buy THE SKIRT! Thank God for that, you won’t have to hear about my fruitless eBay searches forevermore (although, despite being convinced I would never see it again, it irritatingly seems to be all over my local Zara store, so looks like I always would’ve got the damn thing anyway. I still got it fractionally cheaper though. Natch). Secondly, the dog-spotting game turned up a notch. By this point we’d started to get a little competitive and kept finding that we were spotting dogs at the exact same time (I know. Made for each other – what a pair of freaking weirdos) so we had to create a rule for if this happened with an intricate spinning around and touching the ground ritual that must be performed for it to count. Ironically it didn’t happen again after that, so we didn’t have a chance to see how idiotic that looked, but I’m VERY excited about playing again sometime soon…. Lastly, our hotel had a spa! So after popping back into town to buy some clean underwear (and THE SKIRT. I don’t really know why it has to be in capitals now but I feel it is very important for you to acknowledge how much I love THE SKIRT) we headed back to make the most of the facilities and relax before what was due to be an uber long day of travelling. You will note in the pictures I can be seen simply oozing class, drinking cans of Heineken we had left from the night before. I have no shame, you can’t drink fizz everyday. And in fairness, it wasn’t that posh. There was a cockroach incident and everything, but I still haven’t quite gotten over that yet so I’m not quite ready to talk about it….
Anyway, all that relaxing got us nice and ready for one last slap up meal, so we wandered through the posh part of town, gazing at the Gaudi architecture and designer store fronts, until we found a nice place to order ALL THE TAPAS and a bottle of wine to toast the end of a wonderful trip. After spending a good few hours freaking out about being stuck there I was sad that it really had come to an end now. I almost wanted to try and stay awake in case it stopped the next day happening, like when you’re a kid and you don’t want Christmas to be over, but alas, we had an early start and 15 hours of train journey to look forward to, so off to bed we went like good little stranded travellers.
And there you go – finally the masses of holiday pics come to an end! Well, after these ones of course….
Love,
Picking the Day 