Back to BCN

42 days, 5 countries, 8 ferries, 5,237 kilometers and 15 beds later, we are back in Barcelona.  We arrived on Thursday evening after two long days of driving.  Our friends Jon and Laura, who recently moved here for their own magical year, were kind enough to let us stay with them in their fabulous Barri Gotic apartment.  Their kids, Django and Xara, get along terrifically with ours, so it’s a good match.  Perhaps foreseeing the chaos we would trail in our wake, they left on Friday morning for a couple of days in Mont Blanc.  By the time they get back this afternoon, all should be ship shape.

Since we arrived, Alec has sold our car, closed our bank accounts, shut down our cell phones, and retrieved the luggage we stored at the movers’.  I did mountains of laundry and took the kids to the zoo.  Fearing that we would be over the weight limit with our luggage and wanting to avoid the nasty airport charges, Alec bought a luggage scale.  It is Sunday morning and nearly every bag is very close to the 23 kilo maximum. 

I took a break from the packing yesterday afternoon to meet my friend Isabel for one last trip to the baths.  It was roasting outside so I wasn’t sure if sitting in a steam room would be the right call, but somehow it was perfect—we spent more time than usual in the icy cold plunge.  I could feel my body temperature dropping, dropping, dropping.  We went for a cava in the Born afterwards and said so long, for now.  She is a good friend.

Meanwhile, Alec took the kids to the Museum of the Mammoth, which is right in this neighborhood and where we have never been.  They loved it.  Then it was more packing and organizing until bedtime.

Today we are headed to the Mies van der Rohe pavilion on Montjuic—one of those places we never managed to get to in a whole year.  Then dinner with Laura and Jon, and then, hopefully, an early bedtime—we have to be at the airport by 7 am for the long flight home.