Europe 2006 - Florence to Barcelona

After breakfast we made our way out of the maze of streets and headed north to Millau where we saw the Viaduct du Millau. It's an amazing bridge: the roadway is 800 feet above the valley floor, it's two miles long and the tallest tower is 1000 feet tall! Think of a bridge running over the tops of the towers on the Golden Gate Bridge, but twice as long. We saw it from the vista point and then drove over it twice. Quite a contrast to the Pont du Gard from yesterday, two bridges considered marvels in their times.

We continued south to Barcelona and (after a 20 minute detour when we missed a street) we walked into the Bari Gotic (Gothic Sector) where there are no cars, just pedestrians, to the Hotel Neri. It was a really nice hotel with a nice big room. As we were getting settled in, Rick started to get extremely excited; he loves Barcelona. He was flipping through all of the guide books, picking out a long list of things to see. Actually, it was a list that would have taken a couple of weeks to cover!

Once we grabbed the cameras and started walking around Rick calmed down a little, but he was still pretty wound up! We walked into the big cathedral and then walked over to La Rambla, a big wide street with a pedestrian median down the center. The weather was perfect and there were lots of people out and about.

We had a very tasty dinner in the hotel restaurant and then took the metro to the Eixample neighborhood for a drink at a (very smoky) bar.