Hertz Hurts but Cava is Great

We awoke around 8-ish in Valencia and packed up and left the hotel, heading for El Corte Ingles to get some food for the road. After waiting a bit outside because it was not yet open, we entered the superstore and headed for the bakery counter. We bought some interesting sandwiches / savory pastries, including a salmon roll that was tasty, but loaded with mayonnaise. We also bought some tuna sandwiches and a couple of different kinds of sweet pastries, including one with chocolate, of course.

Because the rental car (our cute little Peugeot) still had the temporary tire on the back, we needed to head to the airport to find the Hertz to see if we could get a new tire. Along the way we needed to make a couple of U-turns, Valencia is not the easiest city to navigate, but we found our way, including getting some gas, which cost about 50€ for the small tank that we had.

At the airport, we parked in the Hertz lot and I went in to find the Hertz counter. The woman there was very friendly and said that our options were to either A) wait to go to the shop to replace the tire, B) wait for a same sized car to come in and swap out, or C) we could swap to a bigger car at a higher rate for the last couple of days. She insisted that we should go with choice A, but when I discovered that it would be 2-4 hours for us to wait at the airport, I asked how much would be choice C. It turned out to be 12€ more per day. Give me a break. Exasperated and amused at her European-ness, I said that C would be fine. Within 20 minutes we were swapped into a slightly bigger car, which I believe was a souped-up European style Ford Focus or something like that. The most suspicious part was that it turned out that the flat tire might not be covered by the insurance we paid for. Hmm. Well, at least we were on the road and not waiting at the airport for two hours to save 12€.

We drove the A-7 north east toward Barcelona. We tried a couple of stops along the way, but honestly not much of it was very picturesque. Some of the countryside was pretty, but the cities seemed tired and overly industrial. Eventually, we gave up and continued on to Barcelona.

We drove through El Pais de Cava, sparkling wine country, and saw many pretty wineries as we came closer to Barcelona. Next visit we'll have to spend some time in that countryside sampling a bit!

The city of Barcelona itself is huge. Vast. We drove into it and it took us about 30 minutes to get our orientation on a map, only doing so when we accidentally spotted La Sagrada Famillia, Gaudi's famous cathedral. We were able to orient from there and found our roundabout way to Las Ramblas, the long pedestrian walking street which cuts through one of the more interesting touristy and university areas of the city from the docks into the heart of Barcelona. We parked in an underground lot (to the tune of about 24€/day) and hopped out to look for a hotel.

Las Ramblas at about 4:00 in the afternoon was teeming with people. T-shirt vendors. Post cards. Posters. Food. All kinds of stuff. It was fun to walk around after a day in the car. We tried a couple of hotels along the main strip, finding prices for so-so rooms from 80€ up to about 120€. Finally, we tried a side alley and found the Hotel Ingles, about as plain and simple as we could want, for only 55€ a night. We took it. The room was very plain. I checked for obvious signs of bugs or unsafe conditions, but found none. It would do.

We strolled around the cavernous streets a bit, finding a real local bar where we tried some tapas, including some paella that was far tastier than the stuff we had in Valencia. They had some linguiça that was really tasty... even Jeanette liked it! We also had some tasty anchovies and bread, all washed down with some decent beer. We then retrieved the bags and headed back to the room to freshen up.

Before dinner time, we headed out to explore the main drag a bit. We found the open air marked and browsed around the fruits and vegetables some. We strolled through a decidedly Middle Eastern part of town on the west side of Las Ramblas. Eventually, found ourselves down another one of the many small alleys where we found a local wine bar that their own vintage of red that was very tasty, cava that Jeanette enjoyed quite well, and a great selection of marinated olives, anchovies, plus bread, cheese, and jamon iberico to leave us quite contented. In fact, we ate enough snacks to qualify for dinner and we left with two whole bottles of the house red to take back to the States with us.