I was running on fumes during the last full day of our trip. My nasty head cold hadn’t gotten much better and honestly I was just tired. Note to anyone traveling outside of the US: take plenty of American meds with you because you can’t get them outside the country. I had Tylenol, throat lozenges and orange juice and hoped for the best.
We started the day by walking to Park Güell. The walk was only about a mile from our AirBnB, but it was mostly uphill. I had read to go earlier in the day because there’s very little shade coverage once inside the park, which we did find to be true. We didn’t pre-buy tickets to the paid portion of the park thinking it wouldn’t be a big deal to get them when we got there. Wrong. We arrive about 9:30 AM and were told the next available tickets for the paid portion of the park (where the cool Guadi work is) weren’t available until 2PM that afternoon. We weren’t going to stick around that long or come back, so we walked through the free portion of the park instead. I would by lying if I didn’t say that I wasn’t a bit disappointed. They let 400 people every half hour into that park and there was no way that many people were there.
We didn’t have much else planned for the day so we were able to take in whatever else we felt like. Tim wanted to check out the F.C. Barcelona stadium (Camp Nou) for the museum and tour. I have to admit that I wasn’t overly impressed with the stadium tour. The ticket price didn’t match the experience. The stadium is getting some major renovations done soon, but for the richest soccer league in the world, it was pretty dumpy. The field was torn up and being worked on, which probably added to the dumpy feelings. The museum portion was okay, but I’m not a diehard FCB or Messi fan either.
We stopped for lunch at Tapas 24 which was on the outskirts of the stadium’s parking lot. It was a weird location, but we had some delicious (and overpriced) croquettes. It also started down pouring at this point and we didn’t bring our rain jacket with us. We waited the rain out as long as we could before we high-tailed it to the closest metro. It continued to rain and storm most of the afternoon so we took that time to make dinner plans and put our luggage back in order.
We headed down near the University of Barcelona for dinner that evening. It was a neat part of town, and I would even say that I would consider staying in that area if we ever make it back. We ate at a restaurant called Vigo. Of course being Westerners, our dinner time was earlier than the locals and the crowds hadn’t rolled in at that point. The food was great! The portions were just much bigger than we had experienced at other places. Of course we still had room for gelato on our last night in town so we stopped at DelaCrem. Hands down, the best gelato of the entire trip. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know about the place sooner or we would have visited it multiple times.
Just as we got back to our AirBnb that evening, another storm rolled in. I sat nursing my head cold the best I could while Tim finished some wine. I was in the state of being exhausted, bummed we were leaving the next day but happy to be going home. It had been a really good trip.
–m.