Barcelona was great!

Hopped on the train again to downtown Barcelona yesterday morning.

The T-10 metro transportation pass has really been handy for us. For €9.95 ($14.50 CAD, $10.50 USD) you get 10 trips on the local transportation, and it includes the airport train. Our ten trips are used up as of our return trip yesterday but we'll be back in Barcelona for a night in April, so we'll buy another T-10 pass today and use the balance when we return.

We headed to the main downtown market, the Mercado de la Boqueria.

Mystery solved!

Yesterday, we hopped on the train to downtown Barcelona. It's only about 20 minutes from where we are staying here at Badalona. We only have to take the one train from Badalona station to the Clot-Arago station at a cost of 1 euro ($1.45 CAD, $1.10 USD) each and then we could walk from there.

And walk we did! Whether it be London, New York, or Cape Town, we've learned that the only way to see a city is to walk it.

Well, the day didn't exactly go as planned.

We were wanting to go for a hike in the hills overlooking Badalona. First, we slept in. It never occurred to us to set the alarm. But there is a room darkening blind on the window, and even at 8:30am it was black as can be inside the room. That, combined with a lack of sleep on the plane the night before, meant that it would be easy to lose track of time.

So it was close to 9am when we actually got out of bed.

I think we're really going to like Spain!

Went for a walk yesterday afternoon just to explore the area a little bit. The beach here in Badalona (just up the coast from Barcelona) is beautiful, but it's off season and of course it's not really beach weather, so there aren't many people out. We found a grocery store with lots of selection, and an especially good gluten free food section. It looks like it will be much easier for us to shop and eat here than when we were in Romania in November.

We are in Barcelona, Spain!

And we're a little tired. But, we are sooooo happy to be here. We're pretty much right on the beach in a suburb of Barcelona called Badalona. But, it's only 20 minutes on the train to get downtown. And the temperature is a very comfortable 15C (60F) and the sun is shining and there is no wind.

In short...it's beautiful!

Happy New Year! And, expense report...

A new year is like a blank book, and the pen is in your hands. It is your chance to write a beautiful story for yourself. 

Happy New Year to all of our readers! We certainly plan on writing a beautiful story for ourselves this year, and it starts today, because we get on a plane to Barcelona, Spain this evening! What a great way to start the new year!

We hope you follow along with us every day. It's going to be exciting as we start our two month European motorhome adventure on January 6th!

Sometimes you have to make do with what you've got...

Well, we've been taking a bit of a blogging break the last few days. Just spending time with family, and so we haven't really been doing anything special. Well, it's been special to us...but not really worth writing a daily blog post about.

Of course there's going to be lots of daily blogging going on starting tomorrow when we fly to Spain!

Moldova Tour Guide

Moldova is a very small country, but we recently spent two full weeks there and wanted to condense our experiences into a single blog post so that people who want to visit can have a single reference source.

Despite the fact that we were there for two weeks, we still felt there were areas we didn't see that we would have liked to. So we'll have to return someday.

Only one problem...

Lots of planning going on for the next few months of travel. But, while all of that has been taking up a fair amount of time, we've also been enjoying being with family and friends in Ottawa. After all, this is why we came here!

Christmas Day was really fun. We enjoyed watching our grandchildren open their gifts. At the ages of 3 and 5, they are right into Santa Claus and all the Christmas excitement.

Booked three flights yesterday!

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions both here and at facebook on where to go after our two month motorhome tour of Spain and Portugal.

Many of you suggested Croatia, and Turkey and of course we really want to go to those places eventually. But logistically, it was going to be too expensive and the flight back to Morocco didn't line up well at a decent price.

So...here's where we're going...

Help us choose a destination!

We had been wanting to visit Algeria in March or April. They don't get many visitors, but every report we have read from people who have been there has been positive. It's a Muslim country, and they have an old bureaucratic Soviet style visa system, so most Westerners simply avoid the place.

But we're not most Westerners.

So I did the research into getting the visa. The first obstacle was that we had to apply from our home country.

Interview on the radio this morning

So, we were up before 6:00am this morning, and walked about 15 minutes from our son's apartment to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) headquarters in downtown Ottawa, Canada. We had slept at our son's apartment to avoid having to drive into the city with possible rush hour traffic problems. We sure do not miss that headache!

We had been told to arrive at 6:30am, and we would be ushered right in for our 6:40am interview.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Woke up to a very Christmas like snowfall this morning. They had been calling for 2-3 cms (an inch) overnight, but we've got more than that now and it's still coming down.

It's all very pretty though. And there's no wind, and the temperature is right around freezing, so it's not really that cold. We can put up with this, especially knowing that it's only for a short time.

One of our goals for our upcoming Spain trip...

My father spent about six months touring around Europe way back in 1954. He was an avid photographer, and he took a lot of slide photographs on that trip. Ruth had scanned and digitized all of his old slides and we now have them all saved on our laptops.

He spent quite a lot of time in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. Coincidentally, we will also be spending quite a lot of time in those countries over the next three months.

How we avoid jet lag!

Flying across time zones can be hard on your system. We've done it a lot of times over the past four years, and I think we've learned how best to minimize the effects of jet lag.

They say that going east is harder on your system because your internal body clock has to be advanced, which is more difficult for the majority of people than delaying it. However on this most recent trip, we thought that the reverse was true!