Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
My wife, Cathy, and I have gone on many week-long cruises around the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and she has often commented that she would love to go on a transatlantic cruise where she could just lay back for two weeks with nothing to do. So, when I came across a super cheap Carnival cruise during the pandemic ($200 for 14 nights in a balcony cabin), I jumped on it. The catch was that it sailed from Barcelona, so we had to fly to Barcelona to take the cruise.
I booked a one-way flight on Air France that made a stopover in Paris, where we had to change terminals to catch the flight to Barcelona. I was supposed to have wheelchair assistance to the connecting flight, which would have allowed me to skip security and customs because it would have been as if I had never de-planed. But the wheelchair assistance never arrived, which meant I had to hobble from one terminal to the next with my cane and carry-on computer case.
First, we encountered a long line to go through security, where the French personnel refused to speak English. I had four semesters of French in high school, although I flunked the fourth semester (it was the only class I ever flunked), and that was 62 years ago.
Thus, I found myself desperately trying to remember every French phrase I could recall. After going through security, we entered a large room with a single-file line waiting to go through customs. There was one clerk processing papers. After approaching the woman and saying, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and being totally ignored, I remembered my handy translator app. I said to her: “Excusez-moi, madame, j’ai un ‘flight’ que je necessaire prendre.” She smiled and moved us to the head of the line, confirming my suspicion that French workers could speak English, but chose to hear only French.
Despite being expedited through customs, we still missed our flight because I had to hobble along with my cane and carry-on computer satchel to another terminal. So, I told Cathy to hustle to the main booking desk and see if we could get on the next flight to Barcelona and told her I would catch up to her.
When I arrived, Cathy was in a shouting match with the French clerk. “Are you calling me a liar?” Cathy demanded as she waved our invoice for wheelchair assistance. The clerk insisted that Cathy had plenty of time to catch the flight and now she would have to pay for a new ticket on the 6 pm flight to Barcelona.
I told Cathy not to say another word, then turned to the clerk and said, glancing down at my translator app, “Excusez-moi madame, c’est ma faute. J’ai beaucoup de mal à marcher et mon “wheelchair” n’est jamais arrivé.” She began filling out two forms.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I inquired.
“These are boarding forms for you and your wife on the flight that leaves for Barcelona in 40 minutes … they are fully paid.” Then she turned to Cathy and said in English: “Your husband is a nice man; I would not do this for you.”
“Merci beaucoup,” I replied. As we walked away to catch our flight, Cathy muttered “I so wanted to tell her that if it wasn’t for us Americans, she would be speaking German.”
“That would not have been helpful,” I replied.
Next, I discovered that Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia and their native language is Catalan. When I tried to speak Spanish, I was immediately identified as an American, because only Americans speak poor Spanish with a Mexican accent.
We had booked a hotel just two blocks from Barcelona’s main tourist attraction: Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, which has been under construction since 1882. We wanted to see the inside but discovered there was a five-day waiting list. So, we had to settle for admiring it from an adjoining park where parakeets swooped from tree to tree or from a nearby sidewalk café.
We sat down at a café across from the Sagrada Familia and after shooing away some pigeons, I ordered a dish with chopped ham. But when the waiter brought our food, a large black and white bird swooped down and tried to eat it. I attempted to swoosh it way with my hand, and it attacked my hand. I took out my butter knife and tried to duel with its beak, but finally gave up. The waiters then chased it away and brought us a new plate of food. They said it was a Magpie; I had never been attacked by a Magpie before.
The next day we took Hop-on/Hop-off buses all around the city, past the Olympic Stadium (Barcelona hosted the 1992 summer Olympics) then down to the beach that was built with sand imported from Egypt for the Olympics, and the harbor full of mega yachts. Later that night, we took in a Flamenco show on the main walking street, “Las Ramblas.” Cathy was not familiar with Flamenco and expected it to be a slow, graceful performance with flowing dresses, but Flamenco is performed with castanets and loud, rapid tap dancing, as if one is trying to stamp on cockroaches.
Cathy loves tap-dancing, so she began practicing Flamenco dancing in our hotel room at night.
The next day, we went to Montserrat, a spectacular cathedral built in the Pyrenees mountains 4,000 feet above Barcelona, and the following day we made a three-country trip to a French ski resort and to Andorra, the smallest nation in Europe. Andorra is not a member of the European Union, and keeps all financial transaction private, so it is a major center for international banking and money laundering. It has no taxes, and a defense budget of just $36,000 a year, so it is easy to understand why there is a pile of wealth in that tiny country tucked away in the Pyrenees Mountains.
Catalonia is an autonomous region of Spain. It gets its name from the castle fortresses built in the Pyrenees mountains as a Christian bulwark against the Islamic Moors who were invading the Iberian Peninsula. Today it is the most prosperous region in Spain, and there is strong support for it becoming an independent nation.
One word about the traffic in Barcelona. There is no street parking for automobiles, and parking garages are very expensive, so the streets are lined with electric motorcycles and electric bicycles. All the cars were clean and looked new; I asked why there were no older cars on the road and was told wholesalers buy them up and sell them in third-world countries. When the pedestrian crosswalk light turns green in Barcelona, you had better move fast, because as soon as it goes red, it is pedal-to-the-metal for all the vehicles. Taxi drivers there are the worst; they weave in and out, cutting within inches of other vehicles. It can be scary for one used to American traffic.
Our cruise departed on Monday. The ship was just out of drydock, and the terminal was clearly not prepared to board 2,700 passengers. Carnival is known as a family-oriented cruise line with lots of activities for children, but there are usually very few children on a 14-day transatlantic cruise. The average age of the passengers on this cruise was probably 75, and the cruise had just one wheelchair to accommodate them. And both the elevator and escalator inside were broken.
After three hours of standing in line, I finally got inside to the area where dozens of other mobility-impaired passengers were waiting for the wheelchair and sharing the pain pills with those who had run out.
But once the cruise got underway, it was totally enjoyable. The crew was very attentive; the entertainment was great; and life without children running everywhere was wonderful.
We stopped at two more ports in Spain, then sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to Los Playa before sailing for five days of cruising across the North Atlantic to Bermuda.
This was the leg of the cruise I was most concerned about because all the tropical storms that usually come into the Gulf of Mexico had been heading into the North Atlantic.
Sure enough, we had to race a storm to Bermuda. The night before we were to land in Bermuda, the ship was rockin’ and rollin’ so much we could not leave our cabins.
When we docked it was still too windy to let anyone off the ship, so we refueled and headed straight to Orlando. While coming through the airport in Houston I must have picked up a virus, because I arrived home sick as a dog.
I have now lost 25 pounds since our sojourn began. I haven’t looked so trim since I finished basic training in the Army back in 1964. Cathy says she is ready to do it all again.
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