Catalonia, Spain - August 2025

When WestJet knocks off one of your five days of vacation due to a flight cancellation, your final vacation day creeps up on you quickly.  Ever have one of those days when everything seems to go wrong? Not necessarily big stuff, but so many little things that you just want to howl? Well, that was our day. Just to give a few quick examples…  1- Our 72-hour e-SIM cards expired at breakfast time, and we spent an hour dealing with hurdles, trying to get something to replace them. (You cannot drive in Europe without a GPS, and a GPS requires data, which requires an e-SIM.) 2- Our big thing for today was to visit a flamingo habitat. We drove through Barcelona traffic for 90 minutes that was enough to induce high blood pressure, only to find the place was closed, even though it was supposed to be open.  3- The bus information to get to central Barcelona for the flamenco show we had booked was bogus, turning a 45-minute ride into 90-minutes and resulted in us missing the first 1...

We set out from Olot at 10AM, after a nice breakfast at our boutique hotel.  First stop — thanks to the hotel front desk clerk — was an unplanned stop, but we were so glad we did stop there!  Besalu is a medieval town with an amazing bridge dating to the 12th century.  Some of the series, Game of Thrones, was filmed here. We had a great time roaming the mediaeval streets. Next step: a return to the Mediterranean coast of the Costa brava, and a playground for the rich and famous in the summertime: Cadaques. We weren’t impressed by the pebble beaches or the clarity of the water, but people seem to be very happy to be there. I guess if you live in an apartment in Berlin or Paris, getting a chance to be by any bit of ocean is seen as quite different and pleasing. Salvador Dali spent a lot of time here, and set up his summer home in the area. From there, after a great lunch in a town where it is almost impossible to get a seat for a meal, we started out for Girona around 2PM. ...

Given the five hour time change, it was 9:01 AM when we opened our eyes, leading to a bit of a mad dash to get up and out. The hotel had provided box breakfast, consisting of focaccia bread, cured meats, juice, and coffee. So we had that in our room. Manresa, where we had spent the night, has one key attraction, its church - La Seu de Manresa, built in 1322. So we wondered the streets and alleys and explored the beautiful church before heading out.  While there were some Autoroutes (ie, large highways akin to the USA’s Interstates) included in our driving today, most of the driving, comprised zigzag, twisty windy roads into the mountains. Our first stop was the near perfect village of Rupit. The village has its roots back in the 11th century, but it died out in the 14th and 15th centuries, due to earthquakes and bubonic plague. It revived again in the 16th and 17th centuries, although it suffered a great deal due to the banditry of the day. Today’...