(Sunday, April 11)
We woke up Sunday morning, ate some breakfast, packed up all of our belongings and headed to the train station. Once at the train station, we asked if they had a better idea on how to get to Barcelona from Rome. They said that Milan had a night train every other day of the week to Barcelona and the next one would be leaving on Monday. Well it’s Sunday and we wanna be in Spain already! We booked the next train to Milan and planned on either booking a flight at a reasonable price or taking a train.
We arrived at the Milan train station and went in search of some Wifi. We left some of our bags at a luggage locker and went outside the train station to find a McDonald’s that we were told had free internet. Why do those golden arches keep haunting us!?! We searched and searched and realized that there was no Mickey Dee’s in sight. We walked back to the train station and found a travel agency. Maybe they could point us in the right direction! We told them that we were trying to get to Barcelona today and they found us a flight with really reasonable price. We had learned in the past 48 hours that if you see a good price, you book it without thinking twice because in 5 minutes it could triple in price. So we booked ourselves a 5:30 flight to Barcelona! We bought our tickets and hopped on the next bus from the train station to the airport and got there around 3pm. As soon as we got inside the airport, we repacked some of our luggage so that we would only have to check one bag each (we had bought a suitcase in Florence for some souvenirs and wine).
We got to the check in counter, started to check in only to find that we had never purchased tickets for this flight. WHAAAAT?! We explained to the guy that we had bought our tickets at the train station and he recommended that we go buy more tickets for the flight at a location within the airport because it was possible that we got scammed. After some more phone calls and craziness, we learned that the travel agency where we bought our tickets was legit and their digital booking stuff was on a different system thus causing a delay in the relay of information among computer servers. Confused? So were we! Our buddy at the desk said to wait a bit and the info would eventually come through. So we waited and waited and the info did finally come through. Success! At this point, we only had about 10 minutes before our flight began boarding. We tossed our bags on the conveyor belts, got our boarding passes, and headed to the security check point - that was a mile long. We got in line and waited. We’ve learned that Marty and JL can make quite a ruckus when others cut in line. It made for quite an adventure. When we finally made it through security, our plane was already boarding so Katie ran ahead to make sure that they waited for us. Once the whole Woodmere Gang caught up, out of breath, we boarded the plane, sat down in our seats and took a breather. Once the plane took off, we all took a lil’ nap on the flight.
About an hour later, we landed in Barcelona. We grabbed all of our bags then found a little restaurant in the airport’s waiting area where we sat down and had a very late lunch/early dinner and researched hostels in Barcelona, Granada, Gibraltar and a possible excursion to Morocco. After spending about two hours researching and booking it was about 10pm. We got our belongings together and headed outside to catch a bus to a metro stop near our hostel. The junior Woodmere Gang members, after traveling these past 6 weeks, have developed a habit of following the directions emailed to us from Hostel World, get off at metro stop “blah” and walk around in circles for a bit until we reach street “blah blah” until we reach the hostel. Our mothers, the more refined travelers, insisted upon calling the hostel to ask them where they are and how to find them. But who needs phone calls when you have iPhone GPS?! So we ignored our mothers requests and eventually found the hostel via iPhone, checked into the hostel and researched tours in Barcelona and potential Granada/Gibraltar/Morocco plans. After all of the travel research and craziness we all finally went to sleep.
XOXO J&K&M&R
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