Barcelona

Finding the parking spot for the campervan proved to be pretty difficult. After an hour circling and finally trying a broader search area we managed to stumble on it. Our intention was to spend the night here, but this didn’t happen as Julie did the math and found out it would cost us around 30 euros for the night, but that was after we had entered and toured the city a bit. The spot was right by the beach and a metro station; it was secure as it had 24 hour surveillance and a fence surrounding it. It also had all the campervan facilities including electricity, bathrooms and even hot showers (think trucker style). We decided to walk in and not take the transit system as our sight was only 4 km away from our destination. We were going to visit the La Saggrada Familia Church (we only saw the exterior), which when completed will be the largest church in the world. Gaudi designed it, but died before telling anyone how it was to be finished. Julie told me on the walk there that she had wanted to see this church because she had seen it as a pit stop on Amazing Race and thought it looked nice. We decided to walk into town to save money and also to see more of Barcelona since we determined the church was really the one thing we wanted to see. Barcelona is really like any large city, large buildings, busy streets, odd smells and odd “art” sculptures. The church though, was really impressive. Too bad we didn’t get the chance to see it in the day light. I figured out how to take better pictures at night and we walked half way around. It’s always interesting to visit big city sights as many of the people are tourists and it’s the one time Julie and I will hear the English language being used. The cost to go inside the church was not at all worth it so we skipped it and went to the McDonalds next door hoping to use the free WiFi, but this being Spain, it was just a WiFi hotspot. On our way back to the van we had another chance to view the church, this time with it being lit up, and it was even more impressive the second time round. I thought it was funny that some of the spires had an ominous green glow coming from them. We had our showers and started to look into our next stop when Julie decided to figure out just how much this spot was going to cost us for the night as it was only around 8pm. Upon the discovery that it was the most expensive place we have stayed at to date, we promptly left and made our way to the town of Figueres, our last town and stop in Spain.