Hell and Heaven

I’m sitting in the little living room of the B&B that Mark and I rented through Sunday morning. It’s a tidy, quiet little place in a bustling area—perfect for a few days in Barcelona. It’s a second-floor walkup with two bedrooms and one bath, a laundry room, a living room, and a kitchen/dinette.

While nice, it’s mostly unremarkable except for. A very pretty tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s so shiny it almost looks like glass.

How we got here is perhaps not as pretty, though it certainly could have been worse.

When we originally decided to do this trip, I was scouting for airfare. Tickets were routinely coming in at $1,200, $1,400, or even $1,600 per person. Our cruise cost just barely more, so I was starting to think we had a problem. I kept looking, though, and stumbled on an American Airlines fare through justfly.com for $720 per person. I jumped on it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to where I landed.

In my haste Alt-Tabbing from website to website, I got a little lost with the “Back” button and ended up booking only my tickets. I started to book Mark’s separately, but when I got to the end of the process, the website asked me to select seats. Hmm. It didn’t ask me to select seats for my tickets. Mark decided to take over his ticket purchase while I tried to figure out how to add seats to my booking. Turns out I couldn’t—at least not on the website.

I called American and explained the situation to a gentleman who seemed disturbingly confused by what I was asking him to do—add seat assignments to my flight adjacent to the seats Mark had selected. He told me that he would reassign Mark to new seats and put me next to him. He didn’t sound convincing. Mark and I had dinner plans, however, and so I was in a hurry. I let him reseat Mark and me and thought, “I’ll check on this in a couple weeks.”

A couple weeks became a month before I finally got around to calling them again. While I was on hold, I discovered not only that I didn’t have any seat assignments, but also, Mark had misunderstood what flight I’d chosen for the Columbus–Charlotte leg and had booked himself on a different flight. Gah! Now I know that the fellow from American a month before didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t have sat us next to each other on the first leg of the trip because we weren’t on the same plane!

The customer-service rep that took my call this time asked how he could help, and I laid out the whole, long, complicated mess we’d made of our booking. He was charming and knowledgeable and was able to truly rebook us in adjacent seats on three legs of the flight. On the Columbus–Charlotte leg, however, he didn’t have any options. Both of our flights were reading as full, so he couldn’t move one of us to the other’s plane. He was very sweet, though, and booked both of us in seat 17A on our respective flights, so at least we would share that. (I’m pretty sure he’s gay, too, and went out of his way to help “family.” I’m grateful for him.)

So, blah blah blah. Mark flew to Charlotte two hours before me, but we both got there and spent the rest of Thursday shuffling from Concourse A through Concourse E killing time. Our flight to Barcelona was scheduled to leave at 8:15 p.m., but it got delayed to 9:15, then moved to another gate, then delayed again to 10:05. By the time we actually got on board, we’d eaten too much, walked too much, and run out of things to talk about. Staring us in the face was seven hours trying to sleep in tight seats.

Mark got a few winks, but as usual, I pretty much didn’t sleep at all. Any sleep I did get was not restful. I was, however, lucky to be in an aisle seat, so at least I had a tad more room. Korean Air this flight wasn’t.

I watched a couple movies—Tolkien (illuminating and entertaining, but not particularly earth shattering, despite the writers’ attempt to inject pathos in to it à la The Theory of Everything), and Men in Black 3? 4? Whatever number it was, other than Chris Hemsworth, meh.

By the time we arrived in Barcelona, my feet had been in shoes—shoes, not sandals—for 24 hours and were killing me. My back hurt, my mind was foggy, I had developed a rash, my breath stank, I was dehydrated. All I wanted to do was get to the B&B and rest. Fortunately, the travel gods were through tormenting us, and I was able to check in quickly, send the manageress of the property on her way, and take a two-hour nap.

When I got up, I felt well enough to do a little exploring, so Mark and I walked around to start getting our bearings. Like a black hole, however, the Basilica of the Holy Family (aka, “Sagrada Familia”) drew us to her gates. I have a tour booked for us on Monday after the cruise, so we’ll get to see inside for quite a while, and I’ll talk more about the basilica then, but we took this opportunity to look around the outside. Pictures don’t do it justice (though I’ve shared some of mine below anyway).

After our little excursion, we went back to the B&B freshened up and had a nice birthday dinner (yes, today’s my 51st birthday) at a little Italian restaurant near us called Galú. I’ve been trying to practice my Spanish here and did so tonight, even though the waiter/maitre’d/bartender spoke perfect English. I hope to have goaded Mark into trying to practice his, too. While in Rome, eh?