Barcelona & Valencia, 2019

February 16, 2019 What a reprieve.   We hustle and get up early to clean and leave the apartment in   Valencia by 6:30 am.   Our train is at 7:20 to Barcelona.   Originally our plane to Atlanta left at 1 pm out of Barcelona.   It was cutting it tight to arrive via train at 11:00 to get to airport and fly out at 1:00 PM.   Tight but doable.   Then we get the text.   Your flight has been cancelled.      What a thrill – we are retired so past arranging for Sebastian we are fine to wait a day. So, we choose to bump up our flight to the following day.   This left us with a night in Barcelona.   All along we have been comparing Valencia to Barcelona.   Funny to get this final comparison point.   After checking into our hotel, we head for a restaurant that Lorena had first spotted a couple of years ago: La Taverna del Clinic.   Wow oh wow.   The waiter took extra care with us and we e...

It's our last day in Valencia. We are awakened by a text on my i-phone informing us that our flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta has been cancelled. We move into action and quickly rebook for Monday and communicate with our Asheville folks about the change of plans. We manage that before coffee. We buy more money for our cell phone, refurbish TP and PT supplies, and then retreat back into the apartment to recover from the shock of having to be responsible after 4 weeks of fecklessness. I work on the blog while Kitty finishes her Paul Theroux novel. We set out about 2:00 for a recommended neighborhood for restaurants. We had walked through this area the other day and there is a dizzying array of restaurant possibilities. We play the game of walking around the block. I spy a cider joint and Kitty a place that has coquettes. We try the latter, only to discover their fryer is out of order. We decide to settle for a couple of other tapas basics: Russian salad and shrimp in garlic. The fo...

Last night we were so excited with our day trip to L'Albufera at midnight we enthusiastically set into planning our next outing for early the next morning. We had chosen a nearby town with hillside ruins, but then reconsidered adding an extra day trip when time here was so limited. Instead, we took time in the morning to wash clothes, and then went to the baroque museum we’d set out to see a couple of days ago, the Marquis de Dos Aguas.  Marquis de Dos Aguas It was predictably Baroque and exhausting. The palace also housed a ceramic museum, which helped us focus our minds, but also led to a kind of tension between the two parts. Ceramic Museum The stern guards did not permit backtracking and would not return Kitty's smiles as we were meant to complete our ceramics before encountering all that baroque splendor .  Marquis de Dos Aguas We tracked with a group of four Americans with flat, mid-western accents. We did not speak to them, nor they to us. ...