{hello America! - Day 1 Barcelona!}

Back at the end of June I went to Europe for 10 days - Spain and Portugal specifically Barcelona, Sitges and Lisbon!

The reason for the trip was because my college room mate planned a destination wedding in Sitges - a quaint little beach town about 40 mins outside of Barcelona.  

 So off I went back in March to book my tickets to Barcelona to see this one get married!

 After consulting with my travel gal pal we decided we were using backpacks for Europe.  No roll around luggage.  Which was good because people who use those abroad just slow down traffic.  It was much faster moving around from place to place with the backpack on.  Especially since we stayed at AirBnB's.

So off I went on Wednesday June 25th at 5:40am from Sacramento to Denver..

Then Denver to Montreal...

 Then once in Montreal I had the last leg of the flight to Barcelona on this plane here.

 Finally I arrived in Barcelona and met up with these two in the airport after some brief confusion of where we were meeting at.  She said my gate.  I only had 15 mins of free WiFi and she wasn't answering her Viber.. So instead of being at the gate she was outside of the terminal. About an hour and a half of wandering I finally thought - FINE I'll go try and catch a cab and then post outside the apartment until I find her.

Then there she was just standing outside of the terminal.  Argh...

 We couldn't check into our apartment until 2pm so we had some time to kill.

We of course found a little outside restaurant and had some beer and tapas!

Started with the wonderful Estrella beer - Delish!

Salude!

After that we wandered back to our apartment.  Showered up and made ourselves presentable and went out to meet up with our bride to be.

These were from the balcony of our apartment which was about two blocks over from La Ramblas

 Selfie pole - put into action!

I like to take pics of all the places we stayed so this was one of the two bedrooms and only room with AC.

Kitchen and hallway over to the bathroom and other bedroom

 The spacious living room where many dance sesh's happened.

We made our way over to Placa Reial to wait for Mo - she ended up being a few late so we happily helped ourselves to what - more tapas and beer!

 We had them over at this cute little patio restaurant Ocana

My little world traveler Nat and I in a different country! :)

Mmmmm... Patatas Bravas! Pan Con Tomate - the start of a frequent love affair with these two tapas

Kiera and I enjoying more local brew.. She and Nat met in Korea when they taught English there and she lives in Belfast so she made the trip for the weekend to see her and I.   She was just lovely (Spoken in my Irish accent)


Finally Miss Bride to Be made her appearance!

 We finished the beers and headed to a bar to find the USA world cup game!

 
 Many many more beers later we were sad that USA lost but then came to find out they won!

We wandered around the city and had some Paella and then went in for the night to get ready and go out for the night.

 
11pm was apparently WAY to early to go out but we didn't realize that.  But oh well.. We couldn't go to sleep or we'd be caught in jet lag forever..

We paid like 3 euro each to have this bike tote us around to Port Olympica where we of course stayed up till 5am at..

Quite a fun first day!