SPAIN DAY 4: THE ROAD TO BARCELONA

The old On The Road movies hold a special place in my heart.  Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour car tripping to exotic locations with adventures and songs along the way.  Seth MacFarlane has updated the genre, sending Stewie and Brian to places like Europe and the Multiverse.  Today we are producing a hybrid film, Road To Barcelona, Staring Mandy as Dorothy Lamour (the pretty one) and me as Brian Griffin (the happy-go-lucky one, usually found with a drink in hand).

(scene: morning sunrise over the Pyrenees mountains in Cantallops, Spain, Brian and Dorothy sipping strong café con leche outside a quaint country inn.  As their car bumps down the long driveway, the first musical number begins to the rolling of the opening credits.  Appropriately, the open number is Softcell’s Tainted Love, as 1980s American pop and rock music is the only music that is heard in this part of the Spain in every shop, restaurant, gas station and hotel lobby.)

(Some-times I feel I’ve got to BUMP BUMP run a-way…)

(Driving montage covering 90 minutes.  At the end of the opening number our pair rollick into Girona, Spain, an ancient city founded in 79 BC)

We walk the busy streets from the underground car park into the old city.  It’s movie set old Europe, narrow streets lined with modern shops on the ground floors and small apartments above.  We make our way to the ruins of the Turkish baths and do the 15 minute tour, marveling at the ingenuity and engineering.  It’s really not all that different from a modern gym, part health club and part social club, with hot therapy rooms, cold therapy rooms, steam chambers, locker rooms and places to hang out and relax.

(click on the image to see full size pictures)

Walking the wall here is a must-do attraction, so we do.  The wall we walk is 80 meters high in places and surrounds the entirety of the old city, built for protection against the constant barrage of various invading hordes.  Walking the path along the top of the wall provides nice views of the ancient homes and gardens of the former socialites.  Today, the invading hordes are reduced to me, Mandy and a few other tourists courageous enough to brave the hot sunshine.  After just a mile or so, the wall (and hot sun) proves victorious yet again, and we descend back towards the river. 

We let ourselves get lost in the tiny passageways and finally emerge on the bridge designed by Gustave Eifel of the Paris Tower fame.  It’s earlier in Monsour Eifel’s career, but the similarities in design are apparent when you look.  We have fun framing pictures through the diagonals of the steel, the shots reminiscent of Amsterdam.  The water is very shallow, and we see dozens of huge fish swimming among the dense green sea grass.  It takes us a bit to realize the flaw in our logic – to actually take a picture of the bridge, we can’t be standing on it, so we bop over to the next bridge to do so.   

After yesterday’s episode of Extreme Wine Tasting, this morning’s breakfast wasn’t much more than a few sips of café con leche, so we seek out a sidewalk café for some lunch (or whatever they call the 3^nd of 7 daily meals here) and a hair of the grape that bit us.  In proper Spanish style, we order a bunch of sharing plates  – sausages in a little black cast iron pan, fresh white asparagus grilled with olive oil and salt, local olives and rustic bread toasted with tomato and garlic.   Add some sangria and two hours and you get the perfect Catalonian lunch.

We finish the drive to Barcelona and check into the Cotton House, a romantic five star, six story hotel built in the former Cotton Exchange building.  The hotel is an event in and of itself, but we drop our bags and split, excited to get into the famed Gothic Quarter, just a short walk from here.  You may have guessed that Gothic here doesn’t refer to 23 year olds with pale skin in all black, but rather to Goths from the fourteen hundreds.  The Quarter is a shock of nonsensical diagonal lines, crazy angles splitting off other crazy angles, coming together at oddly shaped squares.  The effect is charming, drawing crowds for thousands of years.  The shops are busy fueled by this summer’s wave of post-pandemic travelers, and Mandy and I walk hand-in-hand taking it all in.

Back at the hotel, we stop to get some recommendations from the concierge, Javier.  Javier unfolds a city map and takes us on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood paper tour, marking it up as he goes.  The last neighborhood he tells us about is El Poble-Sec, the place where he typically meets friends for a bite and a drink after work.  He tells us it’s not so polished as some parts of the city, so we should go other places first to get comfortable with the city before we visit there.  We’re not even on the elevator when we decide we’re going to Poble-Sec right now.

It's about a 20 minute walk, mostly through the workaday streets where most Barcelonians live.  We like this walk, one that you would take if you lived here, and we pass the blocks talking about just that.  We end up on Carrer de Blai (Blai Street, or simply Blai to locals like us), the Pinchos capitol of Barcelona, making it the Pinchos capitol of the world.  Pinchos (or Pintxo to Catalonian speakers unlike us) is the 6^th or seven (yes seven!) meals on the daily Spanish eating schedule, typically around 7:30, a snack before dinner at 10.  Blai features nine full blocks lined on both sides with cafes, every one with a ludicrous display of two bite tapas, each with a colored skewer sticking out of the top.  Go in, point-point-point, add a beer or glass of wine, and find a table.  The skewer is color coded to the price of the bite, and we remember Javier’s advice that the 2€ tapas are well worth the premium over their 1€ counterparts.  A well spent Euro every time indeed, upping the game from battered and fried to fresh and creative.  We stopped at three, our favorite being Blai 9, where we sat at the counter and enjoyed talking to the servers and fellow patrons as much as the food.

(As our travelers are American, a two hour, 3 stop, 5 drink meal constitutes dinner.  Cut to fade out of Brian and Dorothy walking away from the camera, and in hand, taking a different route on the way back to the hotel.)

(Roll credits)