From Pilgrims to Tourists

Hello dear readers,

We have had a lovely adventure sight seeing in Barcelona for the last four days.  It was a long eight hour bus ride from Burgos to Barcelona but we were able to be greeted by familiar faces and stay with our friends Megan and Susana that first night.  We have been finding traveling as tourists to be more challenging than just being pilgrims.  We are used to walking everywhere, so that has been a low cost way to explore the city.  Barcelona has many beautiful things to see and we made our best effort to see almost all of them ; )

We stayed with a friend of a friend in the Gothic district for the first few days and toured around the local markets, cathedrals, the Barceloneta (the beach on the Mediterranean Sea), Montjuic, toured the Palau de Musica Catalana (amazing architecture), art museums, walked the ¨Rambla,¨and walked about as much as we would have on the camino!  We then moved up a little higher in the city and explored the Grácia neighborhood, toured the Sagrada Familia and saw many of the other buildings designed by Gaudí.

Yesterday we made our best effort to adhere to the Spanish time schedule.  We ate tapas late in the afternoon, took a long siesta and met up with Megan and Susana for dinner at nine pm!  We ate paella and other delicious food with our friends and stayed up until after midnight, our latest night yet!  We were so proud of ourselves, yet when we got back to where we were staying, everyone else was still up and someone got home around four.  We are just not made for the night life it seems. 

We´ve had a wonderful time in Spain.  We will be posting pictures and editing the blog a little bit once we are settled back in the states.  Tomorrow we fly to Dublin and will get to see two of our Camino friends from our first posts, Mark and Marcela.  We are really looking forward to it.  Tuesday we fly from Dublin and will be back in Chicago.  Keep checking back for pictures!