Hotel Duquesa
When we arrived in Barcelona, the customs line was dreadful. It was very, very long. We waited about 1½ hours just to get through customs and then when we got downstairs our luggage still was not there, so we weren’t too tickled about our Barcelona Airport arrival experience. We got our luggage, we went to the cabstand, and we had such big suitcases that we had to put a suitcase in the front seat! We tried to talk with the cabbie and we remembered enough simple phrases to signal our interest in Spain. We arrived at our hotel, which was the Hotel Duquesa de Cardona. It is a boutique hotel that was located along a maritime promenade in the gothic quarter, a five-minute walk from Olympic Park and one kilometer from Barcelona’s Las Ramblas Boulevard.
Carol checks in
We really liked the hotel. It was small, but quirky. There were only 34 guest rooms, so it wasn’t huge. You didn’t have to worry about running into a lot of people and the style is referred to as “mordeniste” with flat screen TVs, marble bathes, Turkish towels, mini bars, bathrobes and slippers, and high speed internet. We booked it because it was near to the pier where we would depart for our cruise. When we got to the hotel, we found out that Marjorie LaRue, our third companion for the cruise and one of the “Fabulous at 50”, had already checked in. We dumped our stuff, met with Marjorie, put on our tiaras and headed for a walk (although we didn’t wear our tiaras for our walk). We found a little bar and stopped and had sangrias, sausages, cheese and we ordered salad and the salad was different than what we expected. It was tomato, egg, tuna, green and red pepper, and olives. Nobody else in our group was very excited about it, although I thought it was pretty decent, just a little heavy on the oil from the tuna. We also had assorted meats, which were ham, salami and I’m not really sure what the other meat was.
After we had eaten, we walked along the docks where there were vendors selling jewelry, puppets, clothing and art. We popped for a second into the Museum of Catalonian History and took pictures all the way around.
Band Playing in the Park
We also saw a little band playing in the park. On the way back to the hotel we had worked up an appetite so we stopped at the Sailor Restaurant and had a fabulous meal alfresco. We had chicken paella, jambas, which are huge, shrimp. I had lobster piaya and green salad and we shared a pitcher of sangria. My favorite thing of all was the fact that they had chocolate mousse for dessert and boy, oh boy, was it yummy. Our waiter, whose name was Moisus, surprised us all after dinner with shots of schnapps. To Carol and Marjorie, he gave green apple, and to me he gave peach. Fortunately, the hotel wasn’t very far like two doors down and we headed back to the hotel to plan our next day’s outing and transportation, as well as to print Marjorie’s sea pass.
Lunch Counter
The sea pass allows you to expedite your boarding of the cruise ship. If you don’t print it out in advance, you have to stand there and fill out a really long form and all that and Marjorie had completed the process, but just not printed it. What we found out after several attempts to try to get it to print and then calling Royal Caribbean was that you couldn’t print the sea pass 48 hours before the trip. Before going to bed that evening, we called downstairs and asked the night clerk if there was a restaurant nearby for breakfast. Clearly something got lost in the translation because he brought us up a room service door hanger. But at the time I have to say that he was a little bit distracted by two lovely young ladies who were keeping him company down there.
Nancecy 