Barcelona!

Time for our much-awaited Spanish road trip!! Our final destination was Madrid, the occasion a wedding. But we decided to take the opportunity to visit northern Spain a bit.
So off we set in our “trusty” Polo (it had just been to the garage for yet another set of checkups). We first headed to Sete, where we were planning to spend the first night. The reason we chose Sete was that it seemed to be about halfway between Cagnes-sur-Mer and Barcelona, and my battered old Lonely Planet wrote rather favourably about the town.

We arrived just a bit too late to catch the sunset, and checked into our hotel. As our stomachs were grumbling by then, we quickly headed out to find a restaurant. Sete is a pretty touristy place (being a nice town, located by the sea in the south of France pretty much automatically makes a place touristy) – but for now it was thankfully off-season. After a pleasant walk along the canals (a tourist brochure we picked up even went as far as to call Sete the Venice of Languedoc), we opted for a restaurant by the port, where we had a very nice seafood dinner indeed, and for a very reasonable price, at that (compared to the Cote d’Azur, anyway…). Since we wanted to get up early, we went to bed early. Before hitting the road, we had a quick walk around the town, and checked out the main sights. Two of them are actually cemeteries – Georges Brassens (famous French crooner) is buried in one of them, and Paul Valery (a poet, apparently) in the other one.

After this quick but pleasant stay, we continued on our odyssey towards Spain (on the way we stopped at what must be the nicest motorway services I’ve ever been to – the Catalan Village – almost like a tourist attraction in its own right…).

We arrived at Richard’s and Mireia’s place in Barcelona in the afternoon, and quickly made our acquaintance with the new member of the family, an energetic young man named Eric. After the normal catching up the latest chit-chat, we headed down to the local bar for our first cervezas… Alistair, an English mate of Richard’s joined us as well. After a nice Catalan dinner in a local resto, and a couple of more drinks, we headed back for some much-needed sleep…

On Sunday, we left the young parents to their baby-business, and headed into town for a bit of sightseeing. Having walked around in the centre for a bit, taking in the impressive architecture, we visited a very interesting museum, showing some Roman ruins (they are actually under the modern city). After this bit of culture, we met up with the dynamic trio for a very nice tapas lunch (genius culinary invention – I could just eat them all day, no problem!). After some more walking around the city we headed back to the flat and got some Chinese takeaway for dinner (popping into the local bar on the way to catch a bit of local footie, as you do…). We went to bed relatively early (early, considering we were in Spain) since we wanted to get an early start the next morning for the next leg of our trip…

More photos here.