Breeze rolls into Barcelona at 5:30 am; the announcements for people to start leaving the ships (in groups) begin shortly thereafter. We are group 32 out of 33; we are in no hurry and figure last was better.
The last location pic….
Went to breakfast in the dining room; boys came back and took showers. Both fell asleep; this one feel asleep in a robe. With his Mom.
This is the refueling ship coming towards us; I spent some time watching the process while waiting to disembark and while the rest of the family slept.
In the line for a taxi after disembarkation. We hopped the taxi over to the hotel and dropped our bags off before hopping another taxi to begin our Gaudi-kind-of-day…
First stop. Park Guell.
I have added a Gaudi biography to my post-cruise reading list…
Originally designed as a housing development; turned into a garden…
The mosaic dragon fountain. Gaudi had a thing about dragons (more later)…
Our second stop, La Sagrada Familia. What a great cathedral….having a hard time getting the Alan Parsons song out of my head though….
Just some amazing stained glass….
and columns and arches….they are (again) in the midst of major construction trying to finish the cathedral, but, they’ve been trying to finish for almost 70 years…
A pano…had to rotate it to get it but it worked out. This photo, with all of the cranes, is why we purchased the one from Radu that you saw a glimpse of in the last post…
On the walk from Sagrada Familia to Casa Batllo. Again, one of the best things about walking through Europe is the random beauty everywhere….
and off in the distance as well….
Casa Batllo; the last of the Gaudi stops today. The roof of the house is supposed to resemble the scale and spine of a dragon..
Also called the House of Bones….you can see Cpher listening to the audio guide. No straight lines in this house…
The stairwell that reflects light from above down through the house….more on this later…
Courtyard Pic #1
Courtyard Pic #2….the floor is cool here too, not level, always sloped one way or the other…
The top of the stairwell…here you can really see the darker blues near the top and the lighter shades near the bottom (to better reflect the light downwards)
The top of the house; the chimneys from each room are located here instead of spread all over the roof…
After a long day of Gaudi, we retired to the hotel. A two-room suite at the Hotel Colon…these are the balconies from our room that look out onto…
the Barcelona Cathedral (more Gaudi…)
We walked over to local restaurant to watch the Spain-Portugal Euro 2012 semi-final. Spain won in penalty kicks and that was pretty exciting; I have video of the crowd reaction that I’ll assemble one of these days…
I will save discussion of dinner here for a more wide-ranging post on Europe and food. Later.
