Barcelona Blog Day 1 -- Travel Day

One of the things we (mostly me) had been looking forward to with living abroad was how easily we could travel to other parts of Europe. In November, as winter was really starting to settle upon us (which is gloomy, dark, and wet here in Berlin) we thought about heading somewhere sunnier and warmer for "Winter Break" which is the first week of February for Berlin schools. I looked around for various deals and came up with Barcelona. There are tons of places much higher on our "to visit" list, but, for the time of year and budget, Barcelona was a good choice. We'd love to see London, but it's rather pricey and probably even wetter than Berlin at this time of year...not really worth "escaping" to in February for my money. We'd also super love to visit Paris, and if we do that, we'd super love to see Disneyland Paris as part of that trip...again, not really in the budget for the quick get-out-of-Berlin holiday break we had in mind. So, I wanted something "low pressure" (not too much we HAD to see) and south-er. :)

Well, would you believe that I found flights from Berlin to Barcelona for €282.95 TOTAL?!?!? For five of us!! Yes, that's round trip. That's not even 57€ per person (currently that's equal to about $62 USD). Cheaper than a train, by far. Combine that with a fairly decent booking.com rate on a 2 bedroom hotel apartment and all five of us were able to enjoy a 6 night vacation for less than the cost of flying just one of us home to Colorado.

February 3, 2015

Part of scoring the cheap flights was because we chose to travel Tuesday through the following Monday. So yeah, the kids missed the first day back at school after break. That's actually quite frowned upon here in Berlin but guess what: I never asked permission. I actually didn't even call them in absent. And no one called me to check either. Reassuring, no? ;)

Anyway, bright and early Tuesday morning we headed down to our train stop. It was lightly snowing and we walked to the corner to catch the U-bahn for the first leg of our journey. Berlin has two airports. Tegel is the nicer one in town...but the budget airlines fly out of an airport called Schönefeld. And it's on the outskirts of town. So it's about an hour from our flat, actually. 2 trains and a bus. We headed out eating muffins I'd made the night before:


The other way the budget airline stays "budget friendly" is to nickel and dime passengers where they can. So, baggage restrictions. Each passenger is allowed one wee carry on bag. But it's smaller than a typical carry on. EasyJet (the airline we flew) allows 50 cm (19.7 inches) x 40 cm (15.7 inches) x 20 cm (7.9 inches). British Airways (what we moved to Berlin on), for comparison's sake allows 56 cm (22 inches) x 45 cm (18 inches) x 25 cm (10 inches). The big kicker is that, on EasyJet, that's all you're allowed. No "personal item" like a backpack or computer bag or purse. Yep, not even a purse. And definitely no free checked baggage, which is really not surprising these days.

We didn't even own enough tiny carry-ons but our friends let us borrow two and then we used Easton's Angry Birds backpack from school and two small suitcases that we already owned.

Waiting for the train, they run a lot less frequently in the wee hours of the morning. We left before 6 a.m. to make it to the airport for our 8:50 a.m. flight.


Eventually we made it to the airport. Which is a very strange (to us) airport. They don't have a bunch of gates. And they don't tell you your gate until, seriously, like 15 minutes before boarding. So, every single traveler is sort of just there in a big mass waiting for the screens to update. We killed a little time in the bathrooms and gift shop:

(Easton was being a bit of a punk so I cut him out of the picture.)

Finally they posted our gate info and we made the surprisingly long trek to get there. And then the planes all sit out a ways from the building itself.


Before long we were on our 2 hour long journey to Barcelona:


A 57€ ticket is also not going to include "luxuries" such as in-flight drinks or snacks, either. But Dalton is one thirsty dude. Like, all the time (and not easy to be around if he's über-parched). So we had to cave and fork over some money to buy a bottle of water from the flight attendants. But it sure made him happy:


I also had to work on the flight to make sure Autumn didn't get motion sick. We (she and I) were really good about not staring down at her device the whole time. We'd look out the window quite a lot. She actually never felt sick at all...which surprised her when she landed, "Hey, I didn't get goopy!" Hooray!

Once we touched down in Barcelona, we wound our way through the airport to catch the train into town. They only come about every half an hour or so:


But it wasn't too long before we were on our way to the stop closest to our hotel:


It was raining quite a lot and there were many exits from the train (we didn't come up out of the "right" one to be closest to our hotel). Jason stopped a lady to ask for directions but she didn't understand English so I had to suck it up and jump in with my Spanish. I was afraid she'd speak only Catalan and not understand mi español but she totes did and I totally understood her as well. She was extremely friendly (we've gotten used to how things can be in Berlin, I think) and she sort of walked along with us telling me about how the street we were looking for is "muy larga" and part was "aqui por la izquierda" (here to the left) and "allí a la derecha" (there to the right) and what number were we looking for? She got us right to where we needed to be. So friendly. In the rain!

I went to check in. The guy at reception spoke excellent English but told me I needed to leave a 2000€ deposit for incidentals and potential damage. I was like, "Two thousand?! Thousand??" and he was like, "Yes, but we will refund it". Then a little voice from around the corner piped up "two hundred". Whew. The building with the apartments was across the street and a few doors down from the hotel. I think locals even lived in this building. It was big and clean enough.

Autumn's bed was all set up for us:


That is our exact same IKEA couch as we have in our flat at home, just a different color. :)

The light coming from the top right of the picture above is the small kitchen.


Here is the other angle to the dining area and the balcony:


Off to the right there would be the hall to Jason's and my bedroom and the two bathrooms.

The view from the balcony:


The boys shared a room towards the entrance to the flat. Two twin beds:


It was a great set up for a picky eating family of 5. We headed out into the neighborhood for hummus and falafel for lunch. It was excellent and I got to speak more Spanish. We stopped for a few groceries but they didn't have the same sorts of things we were expecting (no vanilla yogurt for one). We came back to a still-cold room so the hotel staff came to check it out, delivered us blankets and we took forever looking at menus online and then we headed out looking for a pizza place. We walked to three different ones. The first was questionable and the other two were closed so we headed to a busy looking "cafeteria" but that was only a bakery. So we stopped at a fruit stand and headed up to eat some dinner with groceries we had in the flat. Jason headed out to buy himself a can of soup. But he doesn't know Spanish. So the lentil soup he bought wasn't vegan. It wasn't even vegetarian. :( Dalton was feeling homesick (for Berlin!) and when I gave the kids showers, we ran out of hot water during Autumn's. But the hotel had delivered us a couple of space heaters and an adorable Google Translated apology note about the heat in the flat. Time for bed. We would put Autumn to sleep in J's part of the bed so we could stay out in the living area with the kitchen and TV without disturbing her and then Jason would carry her to the sofa bed each night.
Day 2 is here.