Barcelona to Rome

Super behind in travel posts but luckily I took some notes and will summarize. In August, we decided to go on a cruise with my parents and sister because my parents won a free cruise on their last cruise. Of course, August is the hottest time of year to go to Europe and I had to go to Zurich 2.5 weeks before this trip so it was all sorts of ridiculous.

Wed, Aug 13:

I started regretting my flight choice. It was an 11 hour leg to Frankfurt with a super tight 1 hour connection. The flight itself was okay in retrospect though the kids only slept a few hours (due to the 3:30pm flight time) so waking them up was a nightmare.  Reminder to self: Never have a short connection in Frankfurt. Flights land at an outer area and you have to ride a bus to the terminal and the bus waits for everyone to get off the plane. Once there, we had to go to security again and I had a bunch of water/milk which I dumped in a hurry. The security line was short but then we had to sprint because we didn't gate check our stroller thinking it would require too much time to wait for it. So I ran with babyC (he loved it and kept laughing) and C carried H but wasn't able to run very fast. Thank god for the moving walkways. We barely made it on our next flight only to discover we had 4 separate seats. Ouch. But at least the flight attendant convinced some German teenagers to open up 2 seats so H and I could sit together.

Thu:

We arrived at our apartment. I wasn't really thinking it through when the apartment I rented said there were 3 flights of stairs and going up and down them with 2 kids and a stroller. Yeah. Not a great idea but at least we got a workout.

La Sagrada Familia

Fri:
We had tickets to La sagrada familia at 9:30. Yeah, ambitious I know. So of course we were late. Ended up on the wrong metro direction etc etc. Only to arrive and discover I brought the wrong printed tickets and didn't have the confirmation loaded on my phone. I was in a state of panic because I am usually not unprepared like that. But the ticket agent said all we needed was an email confirmation and coincidentally they had free WIFI. So we got in (the line to buy tickets was hours long!).

Cosmocaixa

Sat:

I had heard great things about Cosmocaixa: a children's science museum and it was a rainy day so was perfect but we didn't get there until noon only to discover a horrifically long and slow line. Clearly we should have bought advance tickets to this! Esp given that long lines are not compatible with small children. But this was so large and amazing that it was totally worth it.

Sun:

Excited to get on the cruise ship because it was hard trying to figure out how to get the kids fed. Restaurants didn't open until late and we couldn't really eat out so it was a bit of a struggle. The kids just drank a lot of milk to survive.

Peering at Montserrat

Mon:

We did our first self planned excursion to Montserrat. It involved taking the shuttle from the cruise ship, walking to the metro, and then transferring to the Montserrat train. (Tho the montserrat train station did surprisingly have Wifi).  The final ride was a on a super steep gondola. But we managed to miss every single connection to make the journey long on the way there and back. Argh.
We did go on a little hike but had to bribe H to keep going with M&M's.

Tue:

Palamos, Spain. Medieval villages of Costa Brava: Pals, Peratallada tour.

Wed:

St Tropez. Explored the Citadelle and gawked at the yachts in port.

Thu:

Monte Carlo. This city is tiny and full of escalators/elevators to get around. We headed to the Aquarium but got distracted with a little city tour first which was neat. The aquarium was amazingly packed and was small compared to others we have seen. But the best feature was the rooftop playground for kids.

Aquarium playground

Fri:

Portovenere
Cruised to cinque terre (Monterroso) and then explored the town of Portovenere which was breathtaking as well.

Looking down at the beach in Monterroso

Sat:

Livorno

Biking in Lucca

We rented a car and drove to Lucca because I had heard good things about it as place for biking. It took us a while to get there because for some reason the gps navigated us oddly. We rented some cruisers and biked on the city wall which was super short but it was a cute city with a bunch of playgrounds surprisingly. (We actually didn't stop at any)

Playground in Lucca

On the way back, we realized the GPS had been set to avoid highways  so yeah that explained things. Highways in Italy require toll so maybe that's why the previous person had that setting.

Sun:

Flight back was painful b/c it was 2 long legs and during the second leg, babyC started screaming. Well first he puked all over me and then he started screaming. So yeah, that was painful.