Author: Andrew Reilly
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Discovering Gaudi: Park Güell, etc
Today we really got into the swing of public transport, rail anyway. We caught the metro to Park Güell, which has both a panoramic view of Barcelona and the home and much work of Gaudi. Of course we scampered up to the top of the viewing platform, first, so that we were properly tired, hot…
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Palau de la Música Catalana and Tapas
The tickets for the guided tour of the Palau de la Música were quite expensive, but they’re the only way in, and the guide books all put it at or near the top of the list of must-see places in Barcelona, so we went. Very glad we did. Fantastic building, with a great story, and…
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Arrived safely in Barcelona
Not much to report. Cath’s plan for getting to the apartment, involving a bus trip to the train station, and then train in to the city was fine, but it did rely on a working map to get the last two blocks right. The Garmin’s battery was flat, but with a bit of convincing apple…
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Quick update from 12192m
Emirates has kindly given me 10MB of “free” WiFi, and here I am, two hours from Barcelona, I’ve decided to give it a spin. They haven’t told me how much it costs after the 10M, but a news item about a fellow with a $1600 bill (and the knowledge that this is bouncing off a…
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Eleven days (274 hours) to blast-off
We’re off on another adventure! Significant nervousness around the still large number of unknowns: I’m planning to not take a laptop this time. Madness? We’ve both recently bought tablets (although my Nexus-9 is still in Kowloon, according to the tracking web-site) and don’t really have enough experience with them to know if they’ll do the…
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Oops, Tuscany has flown by already!
Just a quick entry with some photos, on my way off to dinner. Since the post about Bellagio we’ve done more exploring around lake Como, but I won’t touch on that just here. Here there are a few snaps of our last day in the house at Nesso, and then a whirlwind summary of our…
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Weird weather in beautiful Bellagio
Today we went to Bellagio, the town at the northern tip of the peninsula that divides the two “legs” of lake Como. Day started absolutely freezing cold, after a lot of rain overnight. Not actually raining particularly hard in the morning though, drizzle. There was fresh snow on all of the mountain peaks around the…
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Saturday was sunny in Überlingen
Not much of a story at this stage: we’re rushing to get out for the day, but here are some photos from Saturday, which was spent exploring the pretty Bodensee (lake Constance) town of Überlingen. It is about an hour’s drive west of where we are staying (near Ravensburg.) The shot at the beginning is the…
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How to maximise the inconvenience of a puncture
A tyre chirped a little as I was going around a round-about, on our way to the Thunersee (via Interlaken). Shouldn’t have: I wasn’t going that fast. Perhaps one of the tires was a bit low on pressure. I pulled in to the first petrol station we came to, bought a tank of petrol and…
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To the Ardeche via snow
After a quiet couple of days poking around Puy-en-Valet it was time to head for the Ardeche – a different shape of countryside and different “Plus Beau Villages de France” to see. Our plan was to have a lunch-picnic at the top of a local mountain, Mont Gerbier-du-Jonc, which was on the route to our…