Girlie Cruise Day 1: Barcelona, Spain

Ok, so I've officially been home from the Girlie Cruise 2009 for 45 days or so...I guess it's time I should post a trip re-cap for your viewing pleasure. Rather then have one big long blog post, I thought I'd break it down into each day/location.

Day 1-2: Barcelona Spain

When our flight was delayed leaving Detroit, I should've taken that as a sign of the long journey that was to come. We ended up leaving Detroit 2 hours late, but that was ok considering we had a 6 hour layover in Newark, NJ. We met up with my Aunt Lynn and cousin Leslie at the Newark Airport, where we enjoyed their Continental Rewards perks and hung out in the Platinum Lounge (or something like that). It was much better then sitting by the crowded gate. I got a free apple and some crackers...what else beats that?!

Momma B & me waiting at the Newark Airport

Our flight to Barcelona was about 8 hours. We left Newark around 7pm and arrived in Barcelona at 8:00am local time (which was really 3am...what our bodies were used to). Seeing how I was 10 weeks pregnant and my worst symptom was fatigue, I figured I'd sleep through the entire flight, waking up nice and refreshed to begin my European adventures. Ha, yeah right. We were 3 rows from the very back of the plane so there was a constant line for the bathroom and I just felt weird sleeping with some random person standing right next to me., not to mention the consistent elbow knocking or hip-to- the head bumping. I ended up getting about 2 hours of restless sleep.

We got our bags (they all made it safely!) and hailed a taxi for the hotel. We were staying one night in Barcelona, and our cruise ship was set to leave the following day. We dropped our bags off and decided to hit the streets of Barcelona. Our hotel was located in a nice area, with lots of designer shops...Armani, Prada, D&G, Gucci...you know, the things I could never afford!

We headed for the Sagrada Familia church. I'll be completely honest -- I know very little about foreign history, so a lot of the stuff we saw on this trip were things I had never heard of. Apparently this church has been under construction for over 100 years, and isn't scheduled to be finished for another 50 years. It was pretty gorgeous...definitely unlike anything you'd see in the US.

From there we walked to a hop-on-hop-off bus tour stop where we took the bus to a park that was designed by Gaudi. His stuff was really cool -- it almost reminded me of Dr. Suess things. The only bad part about the park (other than the fact it was 90+ degrees and we had been away for over 24 hours) was that it was a complete uphill walk to get there. Go ahead and take an exhausted, out-of-shape, pregnant woman who can hear her pulse in her ears from the extra blood volume in her body and have her walk 1/2 mile completely uphill. Luckily there were cute shops along the way where we stopped so I could catch my breath.

After the park we decided we were thoroughly exhausted, not to mention hot and sweaty, so we took the hop-on-hop-off bus tour around Barcelona and saw all of the sights. Leslie even fell asleep on the bus!

We got cleaned up for dinner and hit the streets to find a nice restaurant. We ended up eating at a tapas restaurant and dined on octopus on potatoes and "fried little fish" which were deep fried minnows...eyeballs and all! Don't worry, there were also some "normal" things as well!

Leslie and our "tapas" of slimy things in shells!

Stay tuned for Day 2: Barcelona on Segways & boarding the Cruise Ship!