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Day 5 (February 17, 2020): Park Guell

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And so it is here already:  our last day in a city we have totally fallen for!  Our last morning in Barcelona was intended to be an opportunity to visit the famous Park Guell, designed by Antoni Gaudí, the chief designer on the Sagrada Família. The  Park is north of Gràcia (where we did the walking tour yesterday) and about 4km from Plaça de Catalunya in the heart of Barcelona. It is where Gaudí turned his hand to landscape gardening. The Park is popular that reservations are normally required.  But we figured that a Monday morning would be slow and quiet there.  Not so!  After our last buffet breakfast at the Four Points, we sat down at the computer in the hotel lobby to see if tickets were needed and were shocked to see that it was almost sold out!  So we snaggled two tickets and set out in a hurry to make our 10AM reservation window.   We weren't quite sure what to expect as we neared the Park in a minibus operated by the city's trans...
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Day 4 (February 16, 2020): From Beach to Mount

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Today was set aside to really criss-cross the city and to explore from the famous beaches to the heights of Montjuic.  And that's exactly what we accomplished.  We set out from the hotel at exactly 10AM and walked south to the beach, where we came up against the annual Barcelona Half'Marathon, which has capacity for 17,000 runners.  Just crossing the street to get the beach was like running across Highway 401 through Toronto!  And an appropriate thing that we did intersect with the half-marathon because, little did we know, we would actually walk close to a half-marathon distance in this day:  when we returned to the hotel tonight, we had logged 26,289 steps, or 20.41KM! After walking a good stretch of the pristine Barcelona beachfront, we headed to Place d'Espanya, with its former bull-ring, never-ending exhibition-convention space, and grand avenue leading up to the decadent National Museum of Art of Catalunya.  The fountains aren't operational in wint...
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