Our fourth European Trip was spent in Spain! Once again, we used Rick Steves' Spain tour book. We have been very pleased with how our previous European trips went when using his books that we decided to continue using him.

We arrived in Barcelona, Spain after a long flight through London,England. Our first flight from LAX was delayed 45 minutes, cutting into our hour-and-30-minute layover from England to Spain. However, the additional time it took to get from one terminal to the next at Heathrow, in addition to having to go through security again, we were cutting it very close! By the time we got to the gate for our second flight, it was 5 minutes until the scheduled departure time! Luckily for us, the second flight was also delayed (it hadn't even started boarding yet), giving us a little breather while we waited.

We didn't arrive in Barcelona until 9pm local time, but with the long delays, our checked-in luggage didn't follow us. It's a good thing that flights between London and Barcelona are frequent, as our luggage was on the next flight due to arrive at 10pm. We decided to wait rather than have our baggage delivered to our hotel the next morning. We didn't have to leave the airport and ate at Pan & Company, a fast-food type chain-store sandwhich place (good food though)

We stayed in Barcelona for 4 nights, but our first choice for our hotel wasn't available all 4 nights. We split up our stay with Hostal Campi, where we had our own private room, but had to share a bathroom and shower (first time we had to do that for any of our vacations), and Hotel Peninsular, our prefered choice with more rooms and better service overall.

One thing to mention, Spain's spanish is slightly different than the spanish heard back home. For example, gracias and 10 are pronounced gra-thias and di-eth. And in Barcelona, catalan is the prefered language over spanish. One living in Barcelona would have to know at least 3 different languages - english, spanish, and catalan!

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Spain 2007 Vacation: (some links not yet active)

Day 1 - Barcelona
Day 2 - Barcelona
Day 3 - Barcelona
Day 4 - Barcelona and night train to Granada
Day 5 - Granada
Day 6 - Granada
Day 7 - Granada and Ronda
Day 8 - Ronda
Day 9 - Ronda and Sevilla
Day 10 - Sevilla
Day 11 - Sevilla and Madrid
Day 12 - Madrid
Day 13 - Madrid
Day 14 - Madrid
Day 15 - Madrid - last day in Spain :(

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