As you may know, on August 24th, Rachel and I headed out for a 16 day trip to Europe to celebrate 10 years of marriage bliss. Today will be the fourth part of a series of blog posts highlighting this amazing trip. (Check out part one, two and three here!) Without further ado…Part Four – Barcelona!

On Thursday morning, we took a short regional flight out of Paris over to Barcelona for the next stop on our trip. Now Barcelona wasn’t really on our list of things when we were originally planning our trip. It just so happened to be the port where we would take our Mediterranean cruise. However, as we started to put all of the pieces together for our trip, I was really excited to see Barcelona. In fact, I probably had more people tell me about how much they love Barcelona versus any other city we would be visiting. So I was super excited to see what the buzz was all about.

Once we arrived in Barcelona and checked into our hotel (which was literally right by the Mediterranean Sea), we headed over to our excursion for the day. Our Travel Agent (and friend) Linda highly recommended an Electric Bike Tour that she and her husband did when they were in Barcelona. It took you around a good portion of the city and included a short boat ride and ride on a cable car up to the top of a mountain overlooking the city (Montjuïc).

 

Instead of going into too much detail, I’ll just say the bike tour excursion wasn’t our favorite part of the trip. It ended up being us, the tour guide and a group of 10 people from Germany. The Germans were super nice and we ended up connecting with a young couple from the group. However, trying to navigate the city on electric bikes proved to be quite tricky, especially for Rachel. There were several times I thought she might just call it. I was super proud of her as she pushed through all the way to the end.

I will say, we ended up getting a great tour of the city and got some awesome views of the city.  It just wasn’t the best 4 hours of our trip.

After we finished the tour, it was already dinnertime, so we grabbed some food and walked down the La Rambla towards our hotel, taking in the city.

The next day, I got up a little earlier to get in a quick run. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and brought about some amazing scenery as I got in a few miles.

After getting ready, the biggest thing on our agenda was visiting La Sagrada Familia, which is a beautiful Roman Catholic Church that has been under construction for over 100 years. Antoni Gaudí was the chief architect, and friends, it is absolutely unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They are projecting the church will be completed by the year 2026, but you can already visit this extraordinary masterpiece.

We ended up in a group with a wonderful tour guide who showed us all of the unique parts of this church. Honestly, you could spend hours looking at all of the details and aspects, from the inside to the outside of La Sagrada Familia, and still feel like you haven’t seen everything. All I can say is it’s 100% worth the trip to Barcelona just to visit this amazing church. 

After our tour, we made our way back down to our hotel, continuing to just take in the city and stopping in a few places along the way.

Once we got back to our hotel later that afternoon, we actually threw some of our dirty clothes in a smaller suitcase and found a laundromat to wash a load. After finishing the laundry, we grabbed dinner and headed back to our hotel to get all of our stuff ready for the next morning, where we would be embarking on our 7-day Disney Mediterranean Cruise!

All in all, we enjoyed our short 2 days in Barcelona and would absolutely love to get back over there one day to see more of this beautiful city. Next stop on our anniversary trip recap…Disney Mediterranean Cruise!