Boundless Horizons

Day 8 – May 27 – Barcelona, Spain

Well, it was finally here. Debarkation day. As expected, we did not wake early enough for the 6:45am breakfast! We woke up at 7am and poured coffee and tea from last night’s room service. Those flasks kept them piping hot and there’s enough for a couple of cups each, which was much needed!

DCL ask you to leave your stateroom by 8am so they can begin turning the rooms around for the next guests, so at 8am we headed up to Cabanas for breakfast. Cabanas was open until 8:30am for those who didn’t want to go to their assigned MDR breakfast. The down side of switching to the early dining was moving to early breakfast, at 6:45am. The late dining breakfast would have been around 8:15am.

Leaving the room, the ship felt really empty. Then we arrived at Cabanas and discovered that’s where all the people were! While it was busy, we didn’t have any problems finding a table. We had a light breakfast to set us up for the morning, then slowly made our way out, taking in the mostly-empty deck 11. When they say Cabanas stops doing breakfast at 8:30, they mean it! The food was taken off the buffet right on schedule. At 8:40am, Captain Mickey came on to make an announcement that he’d “see you real soon” – a very polite way of saying “get off my ship”!

We took the hint from Mickey and headed down to the atrium, though there were still plenty of guests in the queue to leave, so we didn’t feel too bad for sticking around. Even with our relaxed approach, we were off the ship around 8:50am. Our cases were there waiting for us, so we grabbed them and headed out.

I originally wanted to do the Montserrat Half Day debarkation port adventure (BC09H) because it would have picked us up from the ship, taken us on the tour, then dropped us at the hotel. Debarkation day tours can only be booked on the ship so we stopped off at the Port Adventures desk early in the cruise to book it. They told us they were taking a note of who was interested while their tour partner was working on the arrangements. On our day at sea we got a notification in the app to go to the Port Adventures desk for an update, where they said the tour wasn’t running because Montserrat had changed their policy on large tour groups. The only debarkation day tour was the Barcelona City Highlights option, with an option to drop off at the airport or hotel. Since our hotel was centrally located, we figured we’d just go there first and look into the Hop On Hop Off bus instead.

We’d debated using Free Now to order a taxi, but there was a fairly organised taxi line right outside the terminal. The line moved pretty quickly, and we were in the taxi on the way to the hotel by 9:30am. The taxi dropped us at the H10 Urquinaona Plaza at 9:50am and we headed inside.

Although check-in wasn’t until 3pm, we were able to start the registration process and drop our bags off in their secure store room. They said they’d give us a call if the room was available sooner, and asked if there was anything they could help with. When I said we were going to look into the Hop On Hop Off bus (HOHO), they said they could arrange tickets for us which was really helpful. They booked tickets online and printed out the voucher for us to take to the HOHO stand to exchange for tickets.

The starting point for the HOHO was Urquinaona Plaza itself, just a block down from the hotel. The bus has two routes, Green (east) and Orange (west). While you can get on and off at any stop, we were feeling pretty tired after being up early and decided to just ride the whole route, which took about two hours. We boarded the bus for the Green route at 10:45am, plugged our complimentary earphones in for the audio tour, and sat back. While the upper deck is open-top, we opted to sit downstairs where it was cool and shaded.

The Hop On Hop Off bus was ideal for letting us see a lot of the city in a short period of time, and the audio guide was very good. It covered a lot of the sights listed on the Barcelona City Highlights port adventure, and the other stops on the port adventure were places we already planned to see. If we’d had the energy, I’d have liked to hop off at Montjuic to take in the views but we were still able to see the highlights as we drove through – or at least, most of the highlights, we both dozed off at a couple of points!

Just before 12pm, we got a call from the hotel to let us know the room was ready. We were back at Urquinaona Plaza right around two hours after we left, and we went back to the hotel to finish checking in. Like our previous H10 hotel, they offered us a complimentary glass of Cava and we took those up to the roof terrace while they took our bags up to our room. Again, there’s a room tour in the Barcelona highlights on my Instagram. While we technically had an inside room, the large windows in the roof let in plenty of natural light.

We were glad to get a break from the heat, and I had a quick nap to recharge. By that point it was almost 3pm and we realised we hadn’t eaten since breakfast! I’d read that El Corte Ingles had a restaurant on the top floor with great views. El Corte Ingles is essentially a large department store, I’ve been to branches in other parts of Spain. La Placa is the restaurant on the top floor and we had a really tasty sandwich with Iberian ham, and wine on tap!

The views were fabulous! After lunch, we headed back downstairs to take the Orange route on the HOHO bus to see more of the city. We set off around 4pm, and the tour was again about two hours without getting on and off. Parts of the two routes overlap, but largely they take in different areas, with the Orange route covering the west of the city and the Green route going east. We ended up passing the cruise terminal around the time the Dream would be sailing away, though we didn’t manage to hear those horns one last time!

They announced that the Urquinaona Plaza stop was closed due to a protest, which meant the bus would be skipping to the stop after that or we could walk there in about 5 minutes. We never did find out what the protest was for, but we decided to walk from Casa Batlló to the Gothic Quarter. The hotel staff had said that the Gothic Quarter is the only part of the city where the HOHO bus doesn’t go, because the streets are too narrow for it, which worked well as we’d planned to visit the Gothic Quarter that evening.

We started with Barcelona Cathedral, which is so impressive. Being centuries old, it’s an interesting contract to La Sagrada Familia which we visited the following morning. The architecture in Barcelona is really striking, and we appreciated that we’d done the Hop On Hop Off bus tour earlier to see as much as possible.

I’d researched dinner options in advance and liked the look of 4Gats, which is only a short stroll from the cathedral. We arrived around 7:20pm and we were able to get a table right away. We got lucky with our timing as by 8pm a lot of people were waiting outside for a table to open up. The restaurant is a reconstruction of the original restaurant which was frequented by Picasso and Gaudi. We had a wonderful meal here and would definitely recommend it.

After dinner we took a stroll through the Gothic Quarter back to our hotel. We headed up to the rooftop terrace to see what it looked like in at night, and we were able to hear Coldplay who were playing at the Estadi Olimpic.

When we got back to the room, we did a bit of repacking with the luggage to make sure the bags were ready for the flight home the following day, then headed to bed.