8 July Last day in Spain and Barcelona in a rush

Seeing as we had decided to stay in last night and not go exploring Barcelona, there was a lot to see today.

We were quite happy to stay in and chill the night before as we were quite tired. In fact we slept in until 8 this morning. By the time we had had breakfast (a full one again) and packed up and checked out it was 10 am. 

We originally had decided to do the walk through the old part of the town, which was just around the corner from where we were staying, but we decided to take the Turistic bus instead as this took us on a tour around the whole of Barcelona with commentary along the way and we could hop and off when we liked. 

There were three choices of route we could take and we could swap routes along the way at certain points. We chose the blue route as it had the Sagrada Familia on that route. Unfortunately the only photos we got here were from the bus.

The Sagrada Familia was designed by Gaudi and was planned to be built in stages, hence work still continues on it and it is not planned to be completed until 2020 – 2040!!

We didn’t get off there as we had planned to go back there and get off. Unfortunately we didn’t have time as we hadn’t realised how long it would take to get around the routes due to so much traffic and so many stops at traffic lights.

We did get off at the Park Guell stop though and walk up the hill to the park.

I’m glad we did as there was so much Gaudi gaudy to see and a magnificent view of the city below

We stopped off in a shop on the way down to pick up some souvenirs. What an amazing display

We continued on on the blue line until a swap point to the red line where unfortunately it took a long time for a red route bus to come and when it did it was full on top so we had to sit inside down below for a while. Hence most of the photos we took then were a bit of a disaster although I did manage to get a shot of this OK

We did manage to get up on top where there were good views of the port side of the city though.

We realised that if we stayed on the bus we would be late getting back to the hotel to pick up our bags to catch the bus to the airport so we decided to hop off and walk back to the hotel.

The walk took us through La Rambla so we did end up getting to see it after all albeit in a bit of a hurry.

We had to leave earlier to get to the airport than we had hoped as we couldn’t do our check in on line. Their system was down as they were doing a system upgrade and they had put a message on their website recommending everyone got there 3 hours before their flight. We also noticed that our flight time was three quarters of an hour earlier than on our e-ticket.

We got to the airport in good time and had plenty of time to check out the airport and look through the shops etc.

I think Australia must have got the idea from here for their Tree of Knowledge replacement design!!!!

We finally boarded the plane and ended up waiting on the tarmac for quite some time before take off