We woke before the alarm & had bed tea & coffee before finishing our packing & discovering the milk we’d purchased yesterday was off, not sure how as it was dated use by 1 April. Richard ate as much as he could on his weetbix, I had no yogurt left, the supermarkets don’t open until 9 am & we know from experience no cafes do either & our train left at 9 am. I had an avocado (yes a whole small one, I did offer Richard some) & also four cherry tomatoes, yummy. Our cab arrived on time at 8.10am & we headed to the train station. The main entrance was closed & the pavement dug up so we headed in a side entrance, we looked at the monitor but no platform numbers were shown, I went into the ticket office (five people were behind the counter at 8.40am on a Saturday & no customers). I asked which platform the Barcelona train went from & he said no trains, this is where the language barrier became challenging. I eventually worked out there was a replacement bus service to Alicante, then a train to Barcelona. We located the correct bus & boarded for the 1 hour trip. Once at the station in Alicante there was slight confusion, we’d arrived at 10 am but the next train wasn’t until 11.08am, there was no one around to ask if there was an earlier train, the people from our bus seemed as confused as us. I did find someone to confirm that was our train (we had reserved seating) & we had a coffee & croissant in the cafe before joining a queue to board our train. Lots of leg room & one set of seats with a centre table.

I did think it strange that the majority of passengers were going backwards, but we pulled back out of Valencia in the same direction meaning from there we were travelling forwards & following the coast line, most of the way to Barcelona we were either next to the sea or we could see the sea past the caravan/ motor home parks & apartment blocks, it was a lovely sunny day & the sea was flat & a lovely shade of blue. We arrived on time into Barcelona at 4.40pm & located the taxi rank, Richard asked our taxi driver about the football & he kindly put it on the radio for us, the commentary was in Spanish, after a few minutes he asked if we could understand. We met our host & were shown our attic apartment, it’s small but so cute, the spiral staircase did prove a challenge for our luggage, we unpacked a few cells & carried them up before Richard manoeuvred the bags up. We located a supermarket & remembered that supermarkets have been closed on Sundays so have shopped for two days. We’ve had tortellini for dinner, lovely.