Trip to France, Spain and Portugal

Mike and Judy Henderson
September 1 to September 25, 2017

We're in Barcelona and will be traveling home soon.  It's been quite an adventure and more was in store for us today.

9/24/2017  We're on our own today to explore Barcelona.  We began by walking down Las Ramblas to the dock area, then over to the Parc de la Ciutadella.  Here's a map of part of the old town of Barcelona where we explored.  You can see some of the street names on the map.

Today is Sunday, September 24, the celebration of Dia de la Mercé, so many people were "rambling on Las Ramblas".  It is the biggest festival day of the year in Barcelona, and it was thrilling to see it.

We walked all the way down to the end of Las Ramblas where there is a statue of Christopher Columbus.

Some say he's pointing to the new world.

There were a lot of sailboats in the harbor - this is just a few of them.

And a couple of giant yachts.

As we were walking towards the park, we came upon the Estació de França, the oldest train station in Barcelona.  Inaugurated in 1848, then rebuilt in 1929, it's still in use.  It is described as the most beautiful train station in Barcelona.

Here's an inside view.

We continued to the Parc de la Ciutadella.

But by this time we were getting hungry for lunch so we passed the park looking for a café.  We chose this one.  A real "hole in the wall" Barcelona cafe.

An inside view.  We had tapas and a glass of beer.  It was not bad.  They were very busy and the waiters were doing their best, running back and forth

Then we walked to the Arc de Triomf.   Amgen (of the USA) was having some kind of event in the plastic dome and it really blocked the view of the arch.  I have no idea what they were giving away, but there was a long line of people waiting to get in.

Then we headed back to the hotel.  When we got to Las Ramblas, we found an Amorino gelato shop and Judy had a super chocolate cup.

We walked back to the hotel on a different street and as we were passing a courtyard, Judy looked in and saw these figures.  We recognized that they were figures used in parades - from the parade we saw last night.  What we didn't know is that we were to see these figures again.  They must be 12 feel high.

When we got back to the hotel, we went up to the terrace and finished the bottle of wine that we had purchased with dinner the night before.  Judy happened to go to the front desk and learned that there was going to be a BIG parade for the Dia de la Mercé, starting at 6pm and coming down Las Ramblas.  So we went out to see it.  Here come the obligatory police at the start of all parades. 

Then there were these guardsmen on horseback.

This truck came by with a guy yelling some things in Spanish that we didn't understand.  There were two figures, but we of course didn't know who they represented.  They had tubes that shot confetti.  I caught this picture just as they shot off one of the tubes.  Confetti is thrown by many people in the parade, especially the kids marching in the parade.

Then along came those giant figures of people.  I suppose the people of Barcelona recognize the figures, either representations of political figures or historical figures, but as tourist, we don't have any idea what they represent.

Here are two that I think were in the parade last night.

There were many small musical groups in the parade, between the figures.  Some were just a few people in their street clothes.  This was a group of five people, definitely in street clothes.

This group was larger and all wore the same color clothes.

Another small group.

And a group of figures.

A significant number of the figures had Catalan Independence flags draped on their back.  The independence flag consists of the Senyera (Catalan flag) with the addition of the blue triangle and star.  There are two versions of the independence flag, the blue version and the red version.  You can see more about the independence flags here.

Independence supporters hold up four fingers (thumb to the palm) to indicate the four red stripes on the Senyera. (web photo)

Here's a really small group - three musicians!  It seems like anyone who can contribute are encouraged to march.

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Remember those figures we saw in the courtyard last night?  Well, here's one.  The guy carrying it has just set the figure down and is coming out from under her skirt.  Gives you an idea of how tall the figures are.  I suspect those figures are heavy and it's hot under all that cloth.  They set the figures down every so often and switch out the "carrier".

Here you can see the new guy going under her skirt.

This was another of the figures we saw in the courtyard.  You can see the patch of mesh (arrow) that the allows the "carrier" to see where s/he is going.

Young children were in the parade, some throwing confetti, or, as this young girl, handing confetti to children right in front of me.

Here are a couple of very young children, one wearing a devil head.

It just went on and on.  There were so many figures and bands that I lost count.  The sun started going down and still they came.  I have pictures of a lot of them but I can't put them all up here.  Here's one more to finish.

We eventually gave up and went back to the hotel.  The marchers were still coming when we left.

The hotel leaves out "snacks", including ham sandwiches, and that's what we had for dinner on the hotel terrace.  Tomorrow, we head home.

7/25/2017  We have an 11:35 flight out of Barcelona to London and we always arrive at the airport early.  So it was early to rise this morning.  After breakfast at the hotel, we took a taxi about 9am to the Barcelona airport and checked in with British Air.  We were able to use the lounge while waiting for the departure.

Soon it was time to board.

Our departure was on time and in a couple of hours we were landing at Heathrow.

Heathrow is a "walking airport".  I don't know how far it was from the arrival terminal to the area where we had to go through customs and additional screening but it was looong.  They do have some moving sidewalks, which helps.  Then, after we had done all the customs and security stuff, we had to walk to the lounge, which was in our departure terminal.  They had a sign that said it would take 13 minutes to walk to it, and the sign wasn't at the start of the walk!  The path went up and down several times, once on an escalator that spanned several stories.

We had a layover of a couple of hours which we spent in the Singapore lounge (I guess Air New Zealand has a deal with Singapore Airlines).  Here's the plane for the flight to LAX, a 777-300 with the same herringbone seats that I described earlier.

We flew over Greenland (great circle route) and Judy was able to get a few pictures of the snowy terrain.

The flight from London was long - a bit over 10 hours - but uneventful.  We both managed to get a few hours of sleep.  When we arrived at LAX, we were able to fly through customs and immigration because of Global Entry.  Our baggage arrived on the carrousel quickly and we were able to find the limo driver when we exited.

We got home about 9pm local time, but early in the morning body clock time.  We did some unpacking and Judy even got a couple of loads in the washer before we hit the hay.  But, as usual, we were up about 3am.  Judy did six loads of laundry in the middle of the night.

7/26/2107 Our trips always finish when we pick up Skipper and Bernie.  Here's Skipper as we were picking him up at the kennel.  He was excited to hear about Lucy.

And so ends another adventure
You can see our other adventures here

[Afterword] I had some plans to do one or more videos while we were on the trip but I quickly discovered that videos just take too much time to shoot and edit.   I was hard pressed to keep up with editing the still photos during the trip. 

[A note about cameras]  When we began traveling I quickly recognized that I wanted a camera that would fit into my pocket and which had a fairly long lens so that I could get good images of things some distance from me.  I did not want a large camera hanging around my neck and swinging into everything.

The first camera I bought especially for travel was a Samsung WB350F (purchased new on Amazon).  It was a good camera, took good pictures and had a panoramic function built into the camera.  The lens would zoom to a 35mm equivalent of 483mm.  After our Iceland trip, I noticed some spots in the pictures, indicating that dirt had gotten into the lens or on the imager.  I gave the Samsung to a friend for his children to use.

So I bought a Canon SX720HS (purchased used on Amazon).  It was small and had a zoom lens that was the 35mm equivalent of 960mm. The Canon took good pictures but it did not have a panoramic function.  I could do panoramic pictures in Photoshop by combining two or more pictures but that was a pain.  That's the camera I took with us on our South America cruise.

I was gradually learning more about cameras and learned that post processing of RAW images would allow me to do a better job of preparing pictures for display on the web so I went looking for a camera that (1) fit into my pocket, (2) had a fairly long lens to reach out for pictures, (3) panoramic function built into the camera, (4) RAW images, and (5) a viewfinder.  I found that the Panasonic DMC-ZS60 fit these needs (also purchased used on Amazon).  It was small, had a lens that would zoom to the 35mm equivalent of 720mm, did panoramic pictures, offered RAW and had a viewfinder.  I used this camera for our cruise to France, Spain and Portugal.  Sold the Canon on eBay.

My disappointment with this camera was its performance in low light conditions.  When you zoom the lens, the f-stop gets fairly high - and the imager is pretty small (1/2.3").  To deal with this, the camera increases the ISO to a fairly high level, which leads to images with a lot of noise.

This was brought home to me when I looked at two pictures taken in the same place under the same lighting conditions - one with the ZS60 and the other with an iPhone.  The iPhone has a lens that's about f/2 and it can't zoom so the picture was taken on a very small imager but with a fairly fast lens.  There was no noticeable noise on the iPhone picture and a lot of noise on the ZS60 picture.

So I purchased a Panasonic DMC-ZS100 (purchased used on eBay) for our next trip.  The ZS100 is similar to the ZS60 but has a larger imager (1") and a slightly faster lens.  It only zooms to a 35mm equivalent of 250mm so I'm giving up some ability to reach out far.  It's a little bigger than the ZS60 but will still fit into my pocket.  The software in the ZS100 is essentially the same as in the ZS60 so I don't have to go through another learning curve.

I'll use this one for our trip to Israel and see how it performs.