BOB CORBETT'S TRAVEL JOURNAL -- 2006

Journal 21 -- June 6, 2006
Home after our last day in Barcelona and our month-long trip

By Bob Corbett

Folks,

Early evening. Sally and I are just exhausted. We took off on buses today and went out far from the center of Barcelona to some smaller neighborhoods and walked around a lot and just had a ball.

Later we ended up on the dock and walked to the far far side of it to a long row of mainly fish restaurants. We eventually picked one after great stress of choosing, and had a marvelous meal, me of fish and Sally of meat balls, plus sharing a nice salad.

We walked home via Barri Gotic for our last time there and stayed for quite some time watching excellent tango dancers perform, and we ended the food day -- well the food day out from home -- with a lovely ice-cream (Italian style gelato) and have now drug ourselves home.

Our bus trip took us up to the 1992 Olympic village, and other areas in the hills and all around.

I have decided to utterly give up the notion of ´my top five cities´ and to replace that with a list of top virtues in cities I love.

Thus I can easily list from my own travels and tastes naming the following

• Best city for sites to see -- Rome, Italy
• Most vibrant and exciting city -- Paris
• Most elegant city -- Vienna
• Most beautiful and expansive city -- Barcelona
• Most laid back, exotic and inexpensive city -- Istanbul
• Most exciting city for U.S. history -- Boston
• Best place to live -- Dogtown, St. Louis.
• Best street performers city non-music -- Barcelona
• Best street performers in music -- Vienna
• Best mimes -- Paris

Barcelona is so far and away the most beautiful city where I’ve ever been. Many, many, many gigantic wide boulevards, parks just everywhere, and more park benches than any place I’ve ever been -- not just in parks but along streets and boulevards everywhere.

However, Sally and I logged many hours on buses all over the city, every area we could imagine and it is a gigantic city. We never saw one single HOUSE. No, not one single family house. No where at all. None. That’s weird. I had never noticed that anywhere before.

Now it’s up to our room to pack, do our showers and such tonight and be ready to try to leave the hotel my 6 AM to give us plenty of time for our fairly early flight to Chicago tomorrow. The good news is we do have some pretty nice wine up there awaiting the packing job.

Two things I can say about this trip that I can say of no other I’ve ever had:

1. Thirty days of eating marvelous meals and we didn’t eat one single meal in-doors. Every single meal we ate was at an out door seating cafe or restaurant.
2. There was no rain; we had 30 consecutive days of no rain. Well not quite true about the rain. There was a small bit of rain the morning we arrived in Santorini, our fourth day, but by the time we got of the ferry boat it was gone, and then sprinkled a bit later that day, but when I went inside from our balcony to get a rain coat it stopped. Not another drop of rain.
   
   Every day was sunny and breezy. what a time of the year to travel in the areas of Greece and Turkey.

It’s been a simply awesome 30 days and I plan to do a bit more of wrap up and other commentary before closing down the travel list for a while. However, we are hoping to have decided on where our next trip will be by the end of July or August in order to start searching for cheap tickets on airlines. We are tentatively targeting last April of 2007, and thinking, at least at the moment of a trip 1/2 in Italy and 1/2 in Eastern Europe. But all of that is just pure early speculation at this point.

Bob Corbett

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