August 3 -- London to Barcelona

We had a great time in London and saw lots of sights. It is a very easy city to do with kids. But it is expensive!

In the morning we took a cab to Paddington and boarded the Heathrow Express to the airport. We arrived in plenty of time for our Iberia Airways flight to Barcelona. We also met up with the Morris family as they were on our flight.

The flight to Barcelona is not quite two hours. We arrived in Terminal B and cleared immigration. Most of us needed to use the restroom as well. When everyone was done we followed Emily through the one way revolving door to baggage claim. After looking for our flight at baggage carousels and not seeing it we asked an Iberia agent. Turns out our bags were in Terminal A! So we trudged off, all eight of us, to Terminal A.

We get there and find out we can't just go to baggage claim, we need to go through security. So we leave Suzanne with some of the kids and all of the carry ons so we could quickly get through security. It must happen all of the time because we were able to use our London to Barcelona boarding pass stubs to get through. Fifteen minutes later we were all back together with all of our bags.

It was about a 30 minute cab ride from the airport to our apartment, located just off the Ramblas on Calle Ferran. There are nine apartments in the building of which we had four. It was like The Village moved to Barcelona with the Hamiltons, Morris', Houstons and Moreheads. The Morris' had the best apartment because they had a large private courtyard with an outdoor table. We ended up drinking and noshing a lot around that table. Brian brought a small set of portable speakers for his MP3 player so their place was Party Central.

(For whatever reason there are several Irish pubs in Barcelona--ALL located just below our apartments. So we did occasionally wake up to drinking songs being sung loudly at 5:30am. On the other hand, the apartments were very clean and well designed. The location was central and the price was reasonable. Plus, Julie had brought a bag ear plugs.)

Just across the street was the entrance to Placa Reial. We found a small bar in the shade and all of us were eating tapas and drinking beer and sangria. We spent several hours there catching up on everyone's travels and experiences. That night we went wandering for a restaurant and found one that had pretty good paella.

That night we were so tired that we didn't have too much problem falling, or staying, asleep.