Montserrat and More

This day in Spain was really packed! We always want to see as much as we can when we're visiting a city, so we come home exhausted with tired feet, and so far we haven't regretted it! I realized at the end of this trip that for the most part, the only time I set an alarm to wake up is when we're on vacation. There have been a few exceptions, but rarely in our life in Germany do I have a schedule that's strict enough to require an alarm. 

So getting up early was a priority this day. It was difficult to do that because we'd had a full day and didn't get back to our hotel until close to midnight. Our travel buddies were out till later that night, so they slept in and had a relaxing day while we set alarms and headed out pretty early. 

Carson was most excited about going to Montserrat and this was his favorite day in Spain. We went to the Abbey of Montserrat up on the mountain. The journey from Barcelona to the monastery was a little under an hour and a half, which involved a subway and train up to the mountain. There was a cable car option as well which I think may take a little less time, but I enjoyed the train!

The Monastery has been active since it was founded in the 10th century! It was so neat set in the mountains and just had beautiful views all around that we got to explore.

Look how perfectly the light shone here!

This was supposed to be our silhouettes, but the camera got sneaky on me and we just look silly. 

After the monastery, we decided to see some more things on our list. The Arc de Triomf was our next stop. This arch provides entrance to a park and was built at the end of the 19th century for the World's Fair. I didn't know this existed until I began to look for things to do in Barcelona!

We saw some other people picking fruit off the trees, so Carson tried his hand at it. His orange was still a little sour. 

We sat on a park bench, resting our legs and then saw a flutter of green... there were parakeets?! We saw lots of these throughout the city. They had regular old pigeons too though.

We continued walking, our eventual destination the beach, and came across the Cascada Monumental in the park. It was really beautiful.

We found our way to the Sant Sebastia Beach next. On the stairs down to the sand we spotted some cacti.

It was beautiful and the light was perfect. It was windy and the waves were quite large.

We took a bus back because we didn't feel like doing too much more walking, and drove past this cute school.

La Sagrada Familia at night.

We chose a pasta and pizza place for dinner that night. We ate so early that we were the only people in there. They had these fun paintings of Barcelona all over the walls. I had pasta and Carson had a pizza that he said was the best pizza ever.

We needed to find wifi to contact Ben and Ivan, so we found a little cafe and ordered a lemon meringue pie (one of my favorites) and coffee for Carson and finally were able to set a meeting time. 

Due to a communication hiccup, we waited around for awhile in the Gothic Quarter for our friends. 

We were going to go to a specific place with live music but they didn't have any room, so we wandered looking for a new place.

I tried Cava, a sparkling wine that's popular in Spain. It was pretty good! 

We took the train home after sitting and enjoying conversation for a little while. Another long day in the books!