Barcelona!

I am sitting on the balcony of our room at 10.30am (was too tired last night to do this). The sun is shining and it looks like it will be a beautiful day. We have just had a skype call with Karen. Lovely to hear her voice and Razz barking at the computer as it makes a funny noise when connecting to skype. The call was very frustrating as it cut out about 6 times in 20 min and we had to turn the video off to be able to hear at all. I called ffrom the iphone which was connected to the hotel wifi so I am hoping it was using that network. Hard to know as it says vodafone at the top of the phone. If anyone has any suggestions re improving skype calls please email me or leave a comment. I'm not sure what comments you all see on the blog? They all come to my email so thank you for those it is gr8 to hear from you and have feedback about the blog. I'm not sure if you all see the comments when you read the blog?

Anyway, yesterday we drove from Toulouse over the Pyrenees to Barcelona. What a beautiful, beautiful place. I don't think the pictures will do it justice. We climbed to about 1700m above sea level and the temp outside dropped to 11 deg. It must be very beautiful in the winter. Very flash ski resorts as this is where many in Europe come to ski in the winter. Taking photos at 120km hour through a car window is a real challenge. Have lots of nothing at all and lots of trees in the way. On the way up the road wound around the hills but once we got to the top it was very much quicker going down with many huge viaducts crossing the gorges. At the top was a huge tunnel. About 6km long which totally confused the GPS. Several times she told us to do a u turn!!

We went through about 6 toll gates, with several very close to Barcelona. We had problems with one where we went through the reserve lane (open) by mistake so didn't get a docket. This created a huge problem at the next one as you are supposed to put your docket in, it tells you how much you owe and you pay and the barrier lifts and off you go. We couldn't find a person anywhere. We sat in the car at the side for ages hoping someone would come to help. Then we walked to what looked like a deserted building and talked into a box to someone who didn't speak english. But we finally tried to go through and she made it work for us and we were off. The other problem was a toll that only took credit card, no cash and it kept declining ours!! Anyway we are here. Ask us the story of trying to get into the parking building! very funny!

I found some actifed yesterday for my cold and it has dried up my nose. So I feel much better today and pleased to be here for 3 days. This hotel is 3 stars compared to the ones we picked up on the way down and the main difference is the hotel staff here speak good english which is so important. Without that we can't find out how to get to the places we want to go.

Kayley, we got your skype message this morning and we miss you heaps too. Every day we say, Kayley would love this wish she could be here! I will try to work out how to answer your message :)

I upload some photos the other night and at the end the internet connection failed so I lost them on the blog. Thankfully I had saved what I had written. So will have another go here.

These are pears growing at the Luxembourgh gardesn, indicidually wrapped in papaer!

The cars on the right are parked and we are driving down this road (slowly) and turning right at the yellow barrier

Very narrow streets