Retired & Roaming

Barcelona is an easy destination from just about anywhere in Europe. Many flights head there, both to the main airport and to the budget one at Gerona. In our case, living in Tuscany for part of the year, our departure airport of choice was Perugia, an hour away in Umbria.

From Perugia, Italy

Ryan have developed Perugia airport from a sleepy place for small aircraft to a sleepy place for large ones. The process took a while since the runway extension pushed into a different comune from the original bit of the runway. This led to endless official wrangling that took a couple of years to sort out – this is Italy! However, that’s all now history and the airport has been up and running for a couple of years with a number of flights every week from London – very convenient for those in the UK who want to see Assisi.

Many Spaniards obviously also want to see Assisi so in 2008 Ryan extended their services to include a Gerona – Perugia run. A late season deal of only €74 for the two of us for the return trip seemed too good to miss (although Ryan rudely put their credit card fee up to €20),  so we booked and set off in October for a four night jolly in sunny Spain.

With only a handful of flights a day, the officials at Perugia airport don’t have much to do. However, they make the most of it and act as importantly as they can. If the flights are to other Schengen countries, there’s not even Customs to clear so the Dogana man looks a bit lost most of the time. I’m not sure how they’d manage if they had two flights leaving within an hour of each other. But, hey, who’s complaining – at time of writing they still have free parking!

Arrival at Gerona

Since Gerona airport is about 100km from Barcelona, a bit of research was necessary to find the way in. Fortunately one or two travellers have made the trip before and there is a wealth of factoids on the internet sufficient to satisfy the most ardent surfer. There is also an excellent coach service for which tickets are on sale in the arrivals hall and which amazingly links in with the arriving flights. The cost is only €21 return and the coach drops you at a bus station in central Barcelona next to a Metro stop. (Tip: On the Metro, buy a T-10 ticket (10 journey): it saves money and saves the hassle on buying a ticket each time you travel).

Accommodation

We had booked a place to stay on the internet – those words are carefully chosen to avoid the word hotel since the place to stay could in no way be so described. Admittedly it did call itself a hostel (actually it called itself a Hostal) and it filled the basic criterion – it was cheap, about €50 a night.

The Hostal Satram had two other positive features: it was located just two blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the incomplete Gaudi cathedral that is a must-see in Barcelona and it was also near a Metro stop, the Sagrada Familia no less.

Gaudi stuff

We spent the first morning soaking up the amazing architecture of the Sagrada Familia and reading all the stuff on Gaudi. While there must be untold millions of photos of the place, there’s always room for a few more.

After soaking up all that Gaudi architecture, we were on a Gaudi roll so we made our way via the Metro and a series of street escalators up to the Parc Guell where Gaudi’s famous mosaic bench is located.

Elsewhere in the park are various other Gaudi-esque buildings, some of them also with an abundance of mosaics – see gallery below.

The park was not lacking in various entertainers, including an accordionist with deep lines almost carved in his face and an interesting couple performing flamenco dance. He would play a few bars on the guitar while she would dance and then they would freeze and wait until someone threw some money in the hat. It was interesting to speculate on how long they would have remained frozen if no one obliged, but there was always some idiot spoiling the fun.

Other sights

Pretty much Gaudied out, we decided on a change of scene and headed off to the Olympic site from the 1992 Games. The stadium was, well, a stadium, but nearby there was a fascinating Olympic museum, full of great Olympic paraphernalia and well worth a visit. Attached to it was a photographic exhibition of shots by Spanish photographers covering many Games, including Beijing from this year. The image quality from the most recent, using the latest digital equipment, was incredible. However some of the shots from the Barcelona games were also brilliant, such as shots taken of the high diving with the athlete or athletes in frozen in mid-air against a backdrop of the Barcelona skyline -  stunning.

A couple of hours of enjoying the Olympic spirit and the air-conditioning that went with it meant it was time for sundowners and what better place to take them than a tapas bar next to the water in the marina. Great place to spend sunset time and it became our haunt for the next couple of evenings.

Not having really planned in advance, we pretty much wandered for the rest of our time in Barcelona, a good way to get to know a city. In our wanderings, we took in the Picasso museum, the Mirò museum, the cable car over to the beach and an afternoon on the beach where we doggedly ignored the hordes of wandering Asian girls offering massages. When you’re asked on average every 30 seconds if you want a massage, it becomes a bit like a surrealistic joke, and I always reckoned surrealistic jokers should be taken out and shot.

The Picasso museum was good, but it did leave me wondering why he bothered with a lot of the stuff – so many lino cuts and so much time spent reducing the brilliant Las Meninas by Velàzquez to bare essentials. OK, it was a tribute, and Dalí did it too, but over 50 tributes that look a bit like Mr Men paintings! Same with Mirò, some great stuff, but when a famous artist produces three massive white canvases each with one wiggly line on and they become worth a fortune, you wonder if he was having a laugh. Maybe I’m just a philistine.

More Gaudi

We couldn’t leave without a bit more Gaudi and so on our wanderings, we took a tour around the Casa Mila, known by the Spanish as La Pedrera ‘the quarry’. The building is very Gaudi – lots of lumps and bumps, squiggles, curls and curves as he took natural forms and turned them into architecture. The roof area had some quirky forms and also a good view of the Sagrada Familia.

Three full days touring Barcelona was enough to get a good feel for the place and our choice of season was probably a good one in that you can imagine it getting pretty hot in the summer. When the place you’ve chosen to stay precludes the possibility of returning for a couple of hours with the feet up reading a book, any city can start to close in.

We weren’t sorry to leave our room in the Hostal Satram behind – the purple palace as we called it -  and hit the Ryan trail back to Perugia. Another great advantage of the little airport and only hand luggage was that wheels onto the tarmac to key in the car door was all of ten minutes, and then a quick one hour run back home.

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