Barcelona day one - the shit show

Booking first class of the high speed train from Madrid to Barcelona is worth paying for.  So all stress for the morning of being locked in an apartment building disappears (although i’m still left with that unsettling feeling of what happens if there is ever a fire in these places).

We reach 300 km an hour on the train and it's pretty cool how far we travel in 2.5hours.  Barcelona Sants is massive, we had decided that arriving at 11.30am, it would be a good idea to make the use of a half day by putting our luggage in storage and doing the hop on hop off bus in Barcelona to see the sights, and fulfil the kids “dream” of doing a double decker bus.  We make our way to the luggage store that doesn’t exist, thankfully find another one not too far away and pay $30€ for 3 hours (that's daylight robbery). So we need to be back at the storage by 3.58pm.  We purchased the tour tickets looking to get on at the train stop for the tour.  But oh wait, you have to go to the office of the tour and get your voucher swapped for a physical ticket (farkkkkk!!). Ok sure, it's 40 mins walking away, so we will get an Uber.  Turns out Barcelona is one of the few cities where taxis have kept their business model sustainable.  In order to use an Uber you have to wait 15 mins as a stand down period.  And after that it locates an Uber, and then the Uber is still another 10 mins away. Rage is now building as we are wasting time, eventually giving in to using a taxi, not before Gareth has heated debates with two taxi drivers.  Third time's a charm and we go to the start of the tour.

Kids tick off their bucket list double decker, but with no one wearing sunblock and two hours in the open top deck, there will be some lobsters later tonight.  The way the city has transformed since the 1992 Olympics makes this one of the few cities we have been to that I personally believe has managed to mix the traditional with the future successfully.   

We don’t actually hop off the bus at any of the stops, as its starting to dawn on us that to do just one loop of this tour is about 2 hours, its getting later in the afternoon, none of us have eaten since 7am when we left Madrid, and we need to get back to the train station for our luggage.  So we see all these amazing sites and pretty much don't take any photos.

Hot, hangry and stressed, we make it to the train station and get Mcdonalds.  Wolfing down most of the food, it's 3.45pm.  We are on the wrong side of this massive station, we start speed walking (for poor Kaia its run / walk) to get to the luggage storage.  The costs of going over time are huge, so we are on a mission.  On the speed walk there is a woman wailing, who we believe has just been mugged at the metro station chasing a person who has long gone, but we have no time for that.  Can’t believe we manage to get to the lockers with 2 mins to spare.  I’m staring at the screen and just can’t see the open locker button.  Gareth swoops in with a calm head, shuffles me out the way to get the codes in before time runs out.  We walk back to the train station, pay a small fortune for everyone to wee in pay toilets, and decide we don’t need anymore stress so get a taxi to the accommodation.

Oh but the accommodation says we haven’t paid the full amount - only the 80% deposit so more euros getting shelled out.  This has probably been the most expensive day of our trip, and not keen to repeat this.

At the end of the day, we walk to the beach, chill out, get beers, play cards with the kids and finally a sense of calm in the Knight household.  I swing between feeling so guilty that I put this much stress on the kids today, and looking at the experience they just had and the resilience they are building for intense situations.  At the dawn of a new day - they are fine.  Can they laugh about yesterday and talk about it today without a look of horror? - yep.