Farewell to BCN

Missing it already. I wasn’t squeezing all the last bits out of the experience when I declined to get up early this morning to get the morning view from the hotel roof. My excuse is that I hadn’t had a particularly good night’s sleep, so needed my rest.

After packing up and then checking out, there was time for a last wander, and a couple of refreshment stops. At Cafe Zurich on Placa de Catalunya, which is actually where we first met Bb and Dd back in 2011. Back at La Candela, where they weren’t serving any food until later. And then finally at a relatively touristy restaurant just on the corner below the hotel, where we had some snacks to set us up for the journey.

That journey went well. The plane on which we flew to Prestwick had come in from Nador in Morocco, and it was clearly completely full. Our flight was a little fuller than last week, but not much. Probably there were around 30 people on the flight. We landed on time, and we were in the car within fifteen minutes of leaving the aeroplane. The journey home was on quiet motorways, and we had time to pick up a couple of bits at the supermarket on the way home. The worst bit was dealing with the stairs at home…the lift is still broken…. 

Our Day 2 Covid tests have arrived, and when we went through passport control in Prestwick, the border force officer said that she had access to all of our health control details on her system. I find that quite spooky that all of these dots have been joined up. Furthermore, when bureaucrats get used to knowing so much about you (justified in this case by the pandemic), it becomes a habit and they don’t ever want to let go. However, the border force officer didn’t ask to see our painfully procured negative Covid tests from yesterday. In fact, the only person who wanted to see that was the Ryanair staff member who went round before boarding checking everyone’s Covid documentation. Travel in the times of Covid, eh….

Well, we’re really glad that we took the leap and made the trip to Barcelona. As Mr A says, it’s great to feel we had time to see quite a bit more of Barca on foot than we had managed before. It was a tonic to be looked after for a week, in a comfortable hotel. And pretty much wherever you eat in Spain, it’s hard to go wrong. We might have a few dry days, though, after relatively enthusiastic consumption of wine and beer for the last week! Pointing, of course, to the best reason to visit Barcelona, namely some of its amazing inhabitants!

The flat is looking fine. The poppies are still popping. Nothing seems to have died, although the peace lilly has drooped. Mind you, Cancarrier told me the other day that this was the way to get it to chuck out new flower shoots. Dry it out to the point of drooping. Well, we shall see.

Back to work in the morning. I hope it doesn’t rain as I might find that a bit depressing. At present, it’s fine - pretty warm. We have the balcony door open, and I’ve opened all the windows to air the flat. But what is noticeable is that the evenings have really ‘drawn in’ during the week we were away. It was already pretty dark by 9.30pm.

Oh, and the blip? A very clever statue called Carmela by Jaume Plensa. More details here. We saw it last night when we had a look at the outside of the Palau de Musica, when we were wandering back from the restaurant. It definitely merited more than just a phone photograph, so I was glad we had time to go back this morning.