At least I got to sleep a bit.
The drive was fun, and I’d found a great deal on a hotel, but it wasn’t until we got about 45 minutes outside the city that I realized that our hotel was actually in the Barcelona suburbs. Now I don’t have anything against the Barcelona suburbs, especially since the hotel room was the nicest and most spacious one we’d had yet, but it did mean that it would take a long time to get back from the city every night. This proved to be an almost fatal error.
After checking in we drove the car into town to drop it off at the train station. This was a major hassle. Following the GPS directions lead us into a distribution center of sorts with fences all around. I don’t know how we got in and I don’t know how we got out. We rechecked the GPS coordinates and for the 300th time the slightly smug British woman warned us that the train station was in a restricted area. I don’t speak GPS so I didn’t know what that meant, and even though Tyler is an engineer, he didn’t either.
When we made it to the city center and pulled into the train station, we couldn’t find the car return area. So I rechecked the GPS again and she told me that the Europcar return center was actually a half-mile away. Winding through the downtown Barcelona streets proved stressful (we had more than a couple close calls), and when we pulled up to a stoplight, a Spanish man started gesturing wildly at us. I thought we might have found ourselves in the middle of a Barcelona turf war, but it turns out our tire was flat. Since the car was on my credit card, I imagined that this would cost me a lot of money and that I would have to fly home early because I would be completely wiped out.
Out of options and on a dangerously low tire, we decided to try the train station again. When we circled the station this time, we saw the smallest Europcar sign imaginably, and we drove toward as if it were an oasis. The language barrier was our friend this time since no one I talked to seemed to understand what a flat tire was. I got off scot-free. We walked out of that train station and believed our Barcelona troubles were behind us.
They weren’t. It turns out there are multiple overlapping transportation systems in Barcelona, and we had a map for one. So when our well-meaning hotel receptionist explained that we needed to take train 4 to get back to the hotel, we assumed she meant one of the metro trains. She didn’t. And we ended up lost in Barcelona for 3 hours that night, boarding train after train, talking to agent after agent, finally ending up in a neighborhood somewhere without any chance of finding the correct. Miraculously we found a cab. Unfortunately that angel of mercy cost us $60 to get home.
At least we were home.
We woke up the next morning convinced our transportation problems were over. We started out well, finding a cab to the correct train station, and boarding the correct train into the city center. We even decided to buy our train tickets for Paris early so that we wouldn’t have any more train hiccups. I found what I thought was the central train station in Barcelona and we headed for it. And we found it. Except it wasn’t the central train in Barcelona. I had assumed it was the train station, since it was the only one I could find on the map. Wrong. I don’t even know why they called it a train station-it had one track. So we had to wait to get our tickets.
At least we could still go to the beach, and we enjoyed a few hours of fun at the beach and then had an amazing meal of tapas at an excellent restaurant and we were confident that we could retrace our steps back to the hotel.
We couldn’t and we ended up more lost than the night before. Somehow we ended up in a warehouse district down by the marina, and because we are gringos from the Texas panhandle, we were convinced we were in Spanish gang territory. I’m serious. At any given moment we thought we were a block away from a Spanish knife fight. There was no public transport around, so we walked. And walked. And walked. For two hours we walked.
We saw a cab and started waving our arms as if we were island castaways flailing at a passing ship. He stopped. We made it home. It was another night of missed connections, missed trains, misunderstandings. We wasted so many hours and so much mental energy trying to get around Barcelona that we hadn’t really seen anything in Barcelona. It felt like a waste.
In all of this I have to admit that we were lost mostly because of me. I would say some train or street or station was the right move and then it ended up being the wrong move. I’m supposed to be the seasoned traveler, the one who’s done the grand tour before, the one who’s lived overseas before, and yet I kept getting us lost. That’s why I was the navigator. But I don’t know who I was kidding. I’ve never been great with directions. I mean, I get lost in Amarillo sometimes. So I don’t know why I even embraced the role as navigator. But after that night, I was no longer the navigator, and we haven’t been lost since.
That’s the thing about travel. It most definitely keeps you humble. It has a way of showing you what you can and cannot do. Me. I’m good at the planning stage. Where we should go, what we should do, what we should eat. But once we get in the field, keep the map away from me. I will get you lost. And if that lesson isn’t something I can take into my everyday life after this fantasy trip has ended, then I don’t know what is.
For more pictures check out Joseph’s website.
Some doors are open, and some roads are blocked. But Chris, you got a heart so big, you could crush that town.