Aug 23 - the food !

Probably the most interesting thing about travel isn't the sights, it's the food.  Well, reconsidering, wine can rank first or second, depending on your appetite.  I can generally sample more types of food in a day than types of wine, so I'll stand my ground and say that food comes first.  I need to continue to do extreme rides so that I have the capacity to eat as much as I want !

The breakfast spreads alone are amazing.  If I remember, I'll take my cell phone down to breakfast tomorrow and take some shots.  Lunch in a warm, wine-infused climate, can be a drawn out affair.  Dinner is a continuation of lunch, with a break in between. 

I went to Mass at the Barcelona Catedral (cathedral), a most amazing place.  The tourists only get to see parts of the church; we attendees see the inner sanctum of one of the most interesting churches that I've been inside.  Today we will tour La Sagrada Familia, with our entrance fee going towards the completion of that basilica, unlike the donation in the collection plate at the cathedral.  The collection "plate" in this church is a small cloth bag on the end of a shortish stick and a very small hole in the top of the flat plate on top of the bag.  That way you can insert your donation carefully but no sleight-of-hand will allow you to make a withdrawal at the same time.  Nice.

After Mass I kind of got lost heading back, narrow alleyways reminiscent of Genoa and Venice, all full of small shops, high end, every label that you could possibly imagine from around the world, alongside no-name craft and clothing shops.  Mile after mile after mile they go on.  As for the people, it's like Bourbon Street in N'Awleans during Maris Gras, busy busy busy.  It wasn't quite as busy at 11pm (yes, me out at 11pm) after our Flamenco Dance show, but there were still mobs, slow walking.  It will be interesting to see if it's just as busy tonight, Monday night, as it was on the weekend.

We did the Picasso museum after I got back from Mass, then lunch in the area, then back to the hotel.  We determined at that point that the best thing to do is pre-book La Sagrada Familia, as we had with Picasso.  The queue for Picasso literally went for blocks, but we had pre-booked and walked right in. 

I was curious as to how big Barcelona is, now that we're her experiencing the mob scene.  It's not even 2m people within "the administrative limit" but 4.7m in the urban area, the largest city on the Med and fourth or fifth largest in Europe, as I read.  Judging by the nationalities that we see, it's larger than that once you count the tourists and of course they are concentrated in a small area.  Americans are noticeable; only they wear baseball caps.  People assume that we're American until we correct them, burying our dual citizenship but of course acknowledging that we live in Florida.

The aftermath of this ride lingers on.  Whoops, I haven't done that blog yet !  Perhaps tomorrow, but I have to get to bed earlier and get up earlier !

I experienced a fair amount of chest congestion on the ride along with a very sore throat.  I had to stop at a pharmacy to get some medicated lozenges because it got to the point where I couldn't swallow.  I've still got the congestion, filled sinuses etc. Apparently other people had this problem this time but of course that's anecdotal.

And then there's Dick, who fell asleep, crashed but finished the ride with two broken ribs, a broken thumb on one hand, broken finger on the other and slightly askew nose, not to mention the broken helmet.  I too have finished rides after crashes, making that very personal decision that I'm not going to feel any better stopped.  One of these days that might turn out to be the wrong decision but I'll likely keep on making the same mistake over and over.

Number 19 behind me, it seems so ho-hum, but for about 24% of the riders who DNF'd, it isn't so.  More on the ride later.

I need a bluetooth mouse.  There's something about this track pad where my palms touch the pad and the cursor jumps elsewhere on the page.  Of course that won't help me when I'm typing, but perhaps with the bluetooth attached, I can disable the track pad.  It's very sensitive. 

Off we go again, hop-on, hop-off that is. 

Onward !