Barcelona

We added Barcelona to our trip because seeing the Sagrada Familia was highly recommended to me by my Camino Kathryn. Paige and I woke up about 4:30 AM since we planned to walk to the train station for our 6:54 AM train to Barcelona.

All was going well, our arrival time was supposed to be 12:54 PM. All of a sudden at about 12:45 AM our train stopped, since we do not understand Spanish, we had no idea what was going on and we actually thought that we were at the train station and just slowing down to enter. When we were told by the Spanish men in front of us what was going on, we could not understand or believe what was happening. All that we knew was there was a total blackout in Spain and in parts Portugal and France, but no one had any idea of what was happening since all the sudden we had no cell service or electricity on the train. To make a long story short, after the police arrived about three hours later, we were surrounded by many police officers and bombers (very good looking Spanish fire fighters). We were helped off the train to urinate, women in the bushes. I am not making this up. After this they decided to get the families and elderly off and we were told that another train was going to pull us to the station Sants in Barcelona. Since that didn’t work, and now it was pitch black, the hundreds of people were escorted off of the train, down rocks, across the tracks, up a very steep and long hill, with luggage, to a long line waiting for many buses to take us to Civic Center. It was now about 10:15 PM. They had sandwiches and water for us and then bigger buses to take us to Sants, the original station of arrival. From there, we were able to get a taxi to our hotel and checked in just before 2 AM.

Our 24 hours in Barcelona was cut short by about nine or 10 hours. After getting about seven hours of sleep, we took a subway to Sagrada Familia and asked if we could use our expired tickets to get in. They kindly allowed us to go in and all I can say is that the awe and beauty of this cathedral created by Gaudi was well worth our incredible train story. We feel blessed to be able to see this masterpiece and even though we had a horrific train experience, we know we were not the only ones affected by the mass power outages in so many countries in southern Europe. Traffic lights, gas stations, trains planes etc were all down.

We had to get to the airport by 2:30 for a 3:50 PM flight to Bari, Italy. The Barcelona airport must be on a different electricity grid because not may flights were affected and thank goodness we were on time for what was a very smooth flight to Bari Italy. If not, I think Paige would have flown home the next day. We were able to share a taxi to the central town of Bari with a very nice young Italian couple, then we took a train to Monopoli.

We are about to explore Monopoli in the daylight but last night we instantly fell in love with this town and it is a dreamy, fairytale beautiful place. I hope that I can upload many more pictures than I have been able to so far due to issues with Wi-Fi.

The initial security police that came to our rescue after we sat for about three hours. We lost power in Castellbisbal about 20 mins from Santa station in Barcelona