Euro2012 – Day Fifteen – Barcelona

 

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.

Euro2012 – Radu Photos – Part One

 

Mr. Radu is the photographer on the Breeze; we went ahead and purchased fourteen of his photos, and I will scan them in for a future post (Part Two).

But these are the ones that were featured on the cruise director’s facebook page; I downloaded the ones that I liked….

Venice, from the Breeze…

Salerno, from the Breeze..

The Breeze in Venice…this must be as the ship was sailing in or out…not sure how the photographer got this shot…and full disclosure leads me to say that it was probably the cruise before ours that he took this shot on…

Looking down on the Lido Deck..

Messina, Sicily.  I have a very similar shot…

ditto…

Positano on the Amalfi Coast….

Cherry-On-Top….the candy shop on the ship and favored hangout for Fric and Frac.  We did not restrict their spending on the cruise and they did ok; not too overboard here or in the arcade…

In Dubrovnik?  Not sure….

Venice again…

Both in Dubrovnik…

Suzanne’s favorite photo of the Breeze; in Venice, at night.

leaving Salerno….

La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.  Must have taken this a while back…more on this in the next post.

Dubrovnik….

Olive trees with Mount Vesuvius in the background…

St. Peter’s Square in Rome….

And the pool and hotubs on Deck Ten Aft on the Breeze

Euro2012 – Day Fourteen – Mallorca

 

Another early start off the boat….we are a little delayed waiting for the gangways to be set in place and the port authorities to clear us, but, a long walk through the port facilities and a quick hop in the taxi and we are at the rental car place.  They are open (this time) and we are rolling north out of Palma…

Pulling into port. 

I’ve fallen behind on my day-by-day blogging because of this stop.  There’s a lot to talk about here and I’ve been putting it off.  There really aren’t a lot of pictures to go with it either and pictures usually take more time. 

We started the day in Valdemossa, a sleepy (stores weren’t even open) when we arrived around 9 am).  Renting a car sounds easy….but this car has a standard transmission, and I wish I had put more thought into that particular aspect of the trip aside from telling Suzanne it should be no problem.  I hadn’t driven a car with a stick-shift in over 15 years and even then I was never very good at it.  I must have stalled the damn thing at least five times on this short 20-km trip and had a few ugly shuddering gear changes as well.  I was very stressed out over the driving and that certainly didn’t help….

View from the scenic point….

Valdemossa was also the site of Cpher puking, again.  Not sure why he was sick again, but it wasn’t pretty; he got some on his shirt and had to wear that shirt the rest of the day..

Valdemossa was really pretty; each house/apartment had these ceramic tiles at the front entrance (you can see two of them here)

And this shot could be a postcard with the flowerpots…

a boy on a rock outcropping

We spent a lot longer in Valdemossa then we thought we would; couldn’t figure out how to put the car in reverse.  Suzanne’s old Maxda had a switch you had to push down on; it took us 30 minutes and finally having to ask someone to figure out that this car had a ring on the gear shift that you had to pull up on to move the gear shift over to reverse…

Most of the pictures you see here are Suzanne, not me, since I’m driving.  And the trip from Valdemossa to Pollenca (on the northern end of the island) was breathtaking.  The drive was better (a car in motion is easier to keep in motion) but still wasn’t’ a very relaxing type of trip….we took a wrong turn in Soller and that was a problem but we were back on track quickly enough.  I mapped everything on google maps before we left and that was damned near useless….the CityMaps2Go app was the best thing..

So, of course, with a poor-stick-shift-driver, what do we choose to do?  take the windiest, curviest roads across Mallorca!  The views were amazing, but, there were more than a few white-knuckle moments.  I really appreciate and will remember how supportive Matthew was as I tried to go from 1st gear to higher gears over and over.

Arrived in Pollenca.  Survived parking the car (illegally!) and then went down by the beach and had lunch.  Really embarrassed by where we had lunch; I know and understand that trying to find the boys something to eat is a challenge but we ended up at this restaurant that was so American it wasn’t even funny. 

some pretty cool sand castles….we plinked some euro coins in the plate…

Mallorca, and the northern cities of Pollenca and Alcudia especially, are where a lot of English and Germans come to vacation.  And it is nice, the water is really calm and it felt like any Caribbean port we’ve been in..

This is my picture, a pano (of sorts) as we continued our dirve north to Cap de Formentor.  This 18 km drive was the curviest, steepest part of the trip….and also the prettiest.  But the combination of my driving and the narrow roads (with dropoffs from the side, with no guardrails, that probably were 500 feet down) certainly ratched the pressure up.  A couple times had to downshift as we came around a switchback…not fun.

The lighthouse at the end, Cap de Formentor.  Suzanne has all of the good pictures here and I’ll try and get some of them over here eventually.

This might be the best picture I have…

And you can see the northern part of the island and part of the road we travelled up here on in this pano…

Parking, here and at any scenic overlook, was a challenge.  We didn’t stop at many scenic overlooks because of the challenges I had with starting and stopping, and this stop at the end was a great example of why we didn’t stop.  You can see those cars down there; that turns this narrow two lane road to a one lane road.  Parked on a hill and had to back up and turn around on that hill.  I’m happy to say the car had no scratches at the end of the trip but man was it a close thing!

The rental, a Nissan Qashqai.  Who names a car that?  It was definitely roomy enough for us…

The beach west of Alcudia.  It was certainly rocky near the shore, but the water was all sandy-bottom and the beach was shallow; I walked at least 500 feet away from shore and the water wasn’t up to my shoulders.  Awfully warm too….really nice!

Made our way back to the Breeze; Fricette had left another note so Cpher and Matthew took off.  Suzanne and I had dinner in the main dining room (Prime Rib and Bacon Mac-and-Cheese) and coincidentally were seated next to Fricette’s parents, Stephanie and Howie, so, that was a good meal and good conversation.

As we packed up, Suzanne and I stopped to enjoy the sunset on the balcony.  

Cpher, probably still feeling a little under the weather, crashed early. 

Two pictures of the atrium; Mom, Dad, and Matthew took one last tour of the ship to end the evening…

The Breeze, heading for Barcelona to end our cruise.