La Platja (The Beach)

This is at the very southern end of Barcelona's quite long foreshore beach.
This is at the very southern end of Barcelona’s quite long foreshore beach.

Might have overdone it a bit today. Cath’s step counter says we’ve walked a bit over eighteen kilometers, about 25000 steps. It was all easy going, liberally interspersed with coffee and lunch stops, but we’re both feeling it.

The original plan of visiting Gerona was put off by the very high chance of rain predicted. It didn’t rain. Well, it hasn’t yet, but it is darkening and cloud is coming down. So we set out to explore the Gothic section again. The charming and friendly proprietor of our second breakfast stop had some recommendations for nice walks along the waterfront, so we ambled in that direction.

Spotted a cable car that ran up to Montjuic, and headed for that. I took an overly optimistic line, and we found ourselves out on an isthmus with the aquarium and a disused imax, from which we had to back-track. Decided to have a restoring beer/wine before the cable car, after that. The cable car ride wasn’t terribly long, but the view was fantastic. Worth it. The view from the park around Montjuic was also great, but neither of the two view-restaurants up there looked like our speed, so we hopped on the return cable ride, and headed back to the nice bar by the beach, for lunch. (Can’t remember the name of the bar, but it was in the shadow of the W hotel, a big glass sail-shaped building right on the water on the ocean side if port Vell.)

After lunch we wandered north up the beach, and kept going until we reached an enormous copper fish sculpture, past the zoo, it turned out. By that stage we needed a bathroom stop, but there were no cafes to be found. We pressed on, back towards the Barceloneta, and eventually found a generic WiFi coffee shop full of students on laptops.

Pretty much headed back to the apartment after that. They were starting to erect a Christmas market in front of the Cathedral, we thought. That should be nice to visit tomorrow night.