The time has finally arrived for us to leave for our Mediterranean cruise. Last night I went to the camera store in San Jose and bought a new super wide angle lens to take, hoping it will come in handy in Europe. We had a lousy route to get to Barcelona Spain, the port where we will board the cruise ship. We got up early and left the house by 7 am, to catch our 11 am flight. This photo is at the SFO airport where we flew Alaskan Airlines to Portland Oregon.

At the Portland airport we had to wait over 4 hours for our international flight.  It is a great airport with free WiFi.  We had only brought one computer but we put it to good use during the long wait parking ourselves outside a Wendy Hamburger place.  I checked the flight on the computer and noticed that there were some empty seats in the middle that had a computer power outlet.  So I went to the gate and had them change our seat assignments.

After 3 pm, we boarded a Northwest flight to Amsterdam.   We were lucky that I had changed the seats because we had the four center seats to ourselves.  That was great because we could take turns taking a nap.

We had a short connection in Amsterdam, just enough time to go through customs and get to our gate where we boarded a KLM flight to Barcelona.  We arrived after 2.5 hours, on schedule.  It was now 22 hours since our flight left SFO and even longer since we had left our home.

We had searched out how to take the train to town so we made our way to the tracks.  I had used an ATM at the Amsterdam airport to get some Euros but they had ony given me 50 Euro bills.  The ticket machine would not take that large of a bill so we had to find some place to buy something to get change.  We then bought two tickets to the Stant Station in Barcelona.

The hotel was near the train station so we could walk there.  We were waiting to check in when we met Fawn and Darrell, who had come the prior day.  We gave a call to Mark and Karen, who had arrived earlier that day and decided to meet in 15 minutes to head out.  The six of us then went exploring Barcelona.

It was now getting dark and a lot of hours had passed since we had had a full night sleep so we were glad when we found a place to enjoy a nice meal.  I am not sure what we ate, but it tasted good.

That bed sure felt good when we finally went to sleep.  It all seemed like a dream since we left California.

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Categories: Vacation
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