CEBToD: Day 0

Well. It looks like I made it to Spain alright... It´s actually the beginning of Day 2, but this is the first chance I´ve had to blog since my arrival. I´ll probably just be sneaky like this over the course of the trip, where I´ll just post as if it´s the end of the day in question, even though for all you know it´s been 5 days and it just took the European internets that long to convey my messages to you´re desktops.

Aaaaaaanyways. Dan´s blogging on the trip as well... his blog is here: http://dans-eurotrip.blogspot.com. Check it out... we´ll both be uploading pics and video as we find machines that allow us access to their USB ports.

So Day 0 was pretty straightforward. I almost missed my flight out of Chicago... I slept all of an hour on Thurs night trying to close out all of my open work stuff, and I got all but 2 things finished, which I may try to tackle here in Europe. The flight to Frankfurt went well (ORD was INSANE), as did the flight to BCN. I waited around BCN for 2 hrs for Dan to show up, then finally stepped outside the baggage area to find him standing there waiting for me. He´d apparently come into a diff baggage area and tried to call my Estonian phone, which of course didn´t work. Good job, Estonia!!!

We took a cab to our hotel (cabbie was an ass about our bike boxes), then rebuilt our bikes in our tiny dorm room at the Ibis. Everything seemed ok, except my stupid rear wheel somehow came un-trued... it´s new, so I think that happened during one of the flights. Dóh!!! Oh, haha, look at how Dóh came out... silly Cataluynan keyboards.

We poked around Barcelona for the rest of the day... saw La Sagrada Familia, and walked down La Rambla... we kind of lost ourselves in the back streets, which was a lot of fun. We got some great paella on some random square from a bit of a tourist trap... but that´s ok cause we also polished off a pitcher of sangria between us... yum!!! When we ordered the full liter, the waiter raised his eyebrows, and I was like, that´s right bitch, get these crazy Americans some booze, stat!!!

We were pretty exhausted at that point... I´d slept a few hrs on the plane, but not a full 8 or anything... so we got gelato on the way back and crashed by 10 pm. A nice first day... though I was a little nervous about the actual biking. =P