Down to the wire

I have that end-of-vacation anxiety in which you think, "Quick! Hurry up! Have as much fun as you can before you have to go home!" Perhaps I need to re-think my whole life strategy, and just stay on vacation.

Overall, I'm very happy with our coverage of Barcelona and the variety of things we have seen, between here, Paris and Rome. I know we could have crammed in a lot more, but we aren't into over-scheduling anymore. My days of returning from a vacation completely exhausted are long over. I'm taking the week off this coming week, just to deal with jet lag and several pieces of life-maintenance that I've put off for this trip. Dentists, veterinarian, car servicing, oh the fun!

The one thing we haven't done, and maybe we should have, is explore culinary Barcelona. I know, my foodie friends will be horrified at us, but we never really wrapped out heads around going out to teensy restaurants at 10pm for dinner.  I'm not an enormous fan of  sitting on the sidewalk amid a dozen smokers and eating paella. (For calamari, I'll deal with the smoke.) Money is another factor: it seems to melt away in European restaurants to a horrifying degree. But mostly, the kids weren't very comfortable dining here, because you rarely see kids in restaurants. I assume you're supposed to leave your little mini-mes at home while you and your spouse go out and eat a $100 meal, but food just isn't important enough to me to bother doing that. Of course, I love all the fresh food markets and the bakeries. I like being able to go and get crepes, or gelato, or whatever strikes your fancy, at late hours. Atlanta doesn't really have that.

Tomorrow we are going up to Montserrat to look around, because we have only seen it from the air. It looks very cool (the name comes from the fact that the mountains are serrated, like a good bread knife). It'll be good to see a bit more nature and a little less of the human influence, though I guess the Montserrat monastery that's about a thousand years old counts as humanity. Perhaps I will join a contemplative order and live out my life free of technological influe---hahahahahahaha, sorry, I couldn't get through that with a straight face.

I'm also trying to drink in as much of the moderate weather as humanly possible, before getting back to the steam bath of Atlanta. And of course, I finally had to brave a couple of the tourist shops to try to find truly raunchy souvenirs for my minions. Cassie spent the day saying, "Oh my God, no Mom, you cannot buy that." Alas.