[title type="h5"]
Day 10: Tuesday, June 2, 2015.
Barcelona.[/title]
[dropcap1]I[/dropcap1]t's our second visit to Barcelona, the famous Catalonian city of we got to know during the Olympics some years ago. Smaller than Madrid but larger than Valencia. Our first time in Barcelona in 2004, the city was the starting point for our first European cruise. Then and now, the city seems much busier, in better condition, and more interesting than I expect.
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The beach and marina in Barcelona, Spain.[/caption]
The ship docks close enough to the center of town--not far from an active beach with a misplaced Ferris wheel--that we can grab one of those jump-on, jump-off buses. It takes us to a random spot from which we begin searching for what seems to me an impossible target. Mary Leigh's cousin Hillary spent an extended time in Spain during her college years. In Barcelona she found what she said was the best chocolate shop in the world. We followed the route she gave us, starting with an enormous thoroughfare, turning onto a boulevard, into a street that led to a passageway from which branched another, smaller passageway. To my astonishment, we find the place. A tiny shop, with a special liquid beverage made with hot water and The Chocolate powder. It is indeed very good. So what's next? Finding Prester John?
While we consume The Chocolate and espresso, Louis Armstrong's voice comes over the shop's sound system singing "La Vie En Rose." I point out this coincidence to the waitress, who registers a blank look. The Marys laugh as if I had just said the most embarrassing thing in the world.
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Barcelona's cathedral, for now. [/caption] [caption id="attachment_47844" align="alignnone" width="300"]
Inside Barcelona's cathedral.[/caption]While we were looking for The Chocolate, we encountered Barcelona's main cathedral, a spectacular edifice of enormous size and with a couple dozen side chapels, each honoring a different saint. I add it to St. Bavo Club, a mental list of the the most impressive churches I've ever seen. (St. Bavo's is in Ghent, Belgium, and was my first really mindblowing European church.)
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Electronic candles.[/caption]
The votive candles in Barcelona's cathedral are interesting. They are not aflame, instead holding little LED bulbs with what looks sort of like a lit candle. I slip a few coins into the slot, and immediately five more lights begin to glow. They don't strike me as overly modern, even though they are. Maybe I would have taken that impression if this were Rome.
Our wanderings bring us to Las Ramblas, the famously well-populated row of shops selling everything from food to clothing. We try to hop on the bus there, but so many people were in line for it that we just kept walking. We pass a women's clothing store that Mary Leigh likes. We spend the next forty-five minutes there. Daughters: you don't know how much fun your fathers have waiting for you to make your selection in such a shop.
We make our way to the most famous site in Barcelona: Sagrada Familia ("Holy Family"), the masterpiece of Barcelona's fantastically original architect Antoni Gaudi. The church he designed over a century ago is still under construction. (I hear that it will be finished in 2026.) One look at it makes your eyeballs bulge. We toured it eleven years ago, walking around on high ramps made of boards. The construction has come astonishingly far since then. It now looks like a church, but not like any you've seen before. It is not only an essential stop on a visit to not just Barcelona but Spain or even Europe.
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Sagrada Familia. [/caption]
Getting tickets for an impromptu visit--the kind favored by Mary Ann--is not easy. Let's just say it involves Wi-Fi, which was available on the hop-on, hop-off bus, but not at the church site. While we wait for our time to come up, we board the long lobe of the hop-on, which is like riding the St. Charles Streetcar, the Tulane Bus, the Canal Streetcar, and back around the belt again several times. It kills enough time for me starting to worry about whether we can fit all MA's objectives into the schedule.
We managed to get our tour of Sagrada Familia, and it is indeed astounding in its size, design, originality, and holiness. We find out that it has eleven more years before it's completed, God willing. Will any of us see it then?
That done, we head to the beach to look at the tremendous restoration around there. The hop-on guide says there are many restaurants there. I don't think we have time, but the girls say we do. We order and the Marys head down to the beach for a look. When they return, their order is here: a row of ham croquettes, a big pot of steamed mussels with no detectable sauce, a sort of guacamole made with smoked salmon and avocado, and a couple of other things. It's all terrible.
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More paella, this one in Barcelona near the beach. [/caption]
The time situation inevitably comes up. MA orders me to get out of her face so she can have some fun for a change. She tell sme to take a cab back to the ship by myself, and that they will follow when it's really time to board the ship. My cab driver takes the long way around and briefly is lost. The Marys' driver delivers them--after checking out all the sailboats in the blue-and-white beach--right on time, not a minute to spare.
Formal night again. My tuxedo will get more use on this two-week trip than it did in the past two years. The menu in Britannia is exceptional tonight. Beef Wellington. Consomme madrilene soup, which I have not encountered on a menu in thirty years, at least. Headless cold-water lobster tails. (You can have all of mine.) Chicken curry. Four vegetarian appetizers and four vegetarian entrees.
Carroll and Marilyn Charvet buy two bottles of St. Supery Cabernet Sauvignon for our dinner table. It's one of Carroll's favorites. I haven't had it in many years, and it's a lot better than I remember--and it wasn't bad then.
After dinner, I hang with a few of the Eat Clubbers in the Commodore's Café, with its magnificent view. The Giancolas are there, and I hold out as long as I can. But my energy is flagging. The Marys are rabbits, and I am a snail, steady but slow.
Or it could be that I am drinking much more than usual. Two glasses of wine is all I drink at a sitting anymore, and not often. The way most of us are drinking on the cruise is past my tolerance. Or maybe I really am a drag, as the Marys insist.
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[title type="h5"]Day 11: Wednesday, June 3, 2015.
Monte Carlo. Trapped In France.[/title]
[dropcap1]L[/dropcap1]ast year, Mary Ann and I celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Europe. Her sisters and some others in her family joined us for a cruise, mostly around Italy. The day we were in Monaco, the four sisters rented a car and drove around the area, having a time so grand that she has talked ever since about doing something like it again. And so it happened. MA was off the ship first thing in the morning, renting a convertible in Monaco, with the idea of tooling around in some swank places on the Mediterranean.
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Eze-Village. barely in France.[/caption]
The only problem with this plan is where to fit me into it. MA's idea was to work her way east, stopping in a series of charming Riviera towns. The first was in a magnificent hotel and restaurant in Eze-Village, 1401 feet up in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean. A lot of restaurants are there--mostly small cafés, plus with one large, expensive dining room in a hotel. We walked around the grounds of the hotel, and felt the luxury and beauty of the place soak in. I wonder how long it will be before MA decides she must spend some time here.
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La Caravelle in Villefranche-sur-mer, France.[/caption]
The next stop was in a place that has some history with us. In the Eat Club's first Euro-cruise, the ship put in at Villefranche-Sur-Mere, a little French town with a beach and a large marina. But our memories of the place are not vivid enough for us to find it easily this time. We drive back and forth along the waterfront, falling into absurdly narrow dead-end streets, not finding any of the many restaurants that I recall seeing on our first visit.
Suddenly, while an argument raged among us as to what to do next, we found the place we remembered. We pulled into a large pay parking lot and took a fateful ticket from the machine at the entrance.
The Marys walk down to the beach and take a dip in the cool blue waters. About half of the other bathers are at least partially nude. Meanwhile, I walk along a row of restaurants. Many years ago, the Frenchness of the menu was enough to interest me. The eats are still quite French, but to my senses they are less exciting, not poking their high points much higher than the average French bistro in New Orleans. No, wait. They are even more commercial than our local places.
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Mussels with a butter-and-herb sauce at La Caravelle.[/caption]
The restaurant I choose for lunch is La Caravelle. "The pirate." The restaurant has tables both outdoors and in. I go inside, where I am the only customer in the house. The sole waitress is working with a young chef. When they are not busy cooking or serving, they keep up a heated conversation in French. It seemed a little discordant. Or maybe it came across that way because MA and I have been speaking the same tones to one another today.
La Caravelle's menu is classic French bistro, but a little diluted. The menu du jour, for example, is not the chef's specials of the day, but more along the lines of a collection of the restaurant's most popular dishes. Pick one each from three courses.
I begin with a half-dozen mussels in a garlic and herb butter, hot enough to sizzle, and therefore something like escargots. I gobbled these up, along with half a loaf of baguette to get up the garlic butter.
Now I have a filet mignon au poivre, with a creamy sauce riddled with crushed peppercorns. Fries on the side, of course, which makes it the classic bistro entree. Creme brulee for dessert. I drink a glass of Provencal red, taking my time, trying to tune in the staff's palaver, and removing from my list the need to finally dine in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
The Marys have a fine time in the water and join me just as my perfectly-timed two-hour lunch is done. MA is ready to move on to the next town. We back the convertible out and point it toward the gate. I am the official parking-ticket holder for our family, because I have never lost one. MA pushes it into the slot at the gate, and follows it with a credit card. Not only does the gate remain down, but the machine keeps both the ticket and the credit card. She keeps trying to make something happen, as cars back up behind us, honking ever more loudly.
We pull out of line and try to figure out what to do. MA walks around and tries to find someone who can finish the transaction and let us get on with our tour--to say nothing about the need to get back to the ship. Nobody seems to have any authority or knowledge of who to call to get the gate working.
A few people come over to offer ideas about how to proceed. One of them swears that if you pull under the gate, with the steel pole a few inches in front of your windshield, and then just sit there, the gate will open. We'll try anything now. Not only does the gate open, but the credit card is spat right back at us. But now there is another gate, and our spirits sink again. We try the trick a second time. And. . . I'll be damned, the thing rises and lets us out! Must have been a language problem.
By now, whatever pleasure we enjoyed in Villefranche-Sur-Mer is trashed by the tension of this modest but potentially very problematical malfunction. We extricate ourselves from the absurdly narrow streets and get back on the main road. This does have points of interest: some of the most expensive resorts and summer homes line the highway for many miles. MA pulls in to take a look, and manages to not be shooed away by the guards at the gates.
Mary Ann has an idea. She knows that I will be anxious about getting back to the ship on time and that this will drive her nuts, which in turn will make me further nuts. She suggests that she let me out in Villefranche-Sur-Mer, where I will walk to the train station and take the next run back to Monte Carlo. I know this train well enough, and have traveled on it from Monte Carlo to Nice. But how often it runs and where the station is are mysteries. I am hesitant to float free in this environment. Just not enough time buffer here.
So we head back toward the famous gambling capital. The Marys let me out of the convertible, and I walk alone back to the ship at around five. They keep tooling around. The ship does not sail until around ten--a very late night for a cruise ship. They were thinking about taking two of our regular Eat Clubbers to one of the fabulous restaurants in Monte Carlo, but the couple is too tired for it. So am I.
While all that is going on, I catch a nice nap and head down to Deck Two for Tom's Pre-Dinner Cocktail Club. I continue to be surprised by the inability of the bartenders on the Queen Victoria to make Negronis. For most of my cruising career, I found that the floating bars usually handle that classic cocktail without flinching.
We have a widely varied but still less than wonderful dinner. The vegetable cream soup wth pesto grabs me away from the consomme with barley. I seem to have made some new friends for the latter. Tuna sashimi seems the best appetizer for me, with seaweed salad and rice.
My entree repeats that of the first night: sirloin strip, trimmed out twice to make it tenderer. It comes with "Pont-Neuf"potatoes, named for a bridge over the Seine in Paris. They look like scaled-down wooden beams, very regular in their cut, and very good.
A lot of good desserts tonight. I somehow miss out of the Florentine basket with strawberries and orange mousse, going instead with dulce de leche and pistachio ice creams.
I join the Giancolas in Commodore's Café after dinner. I have a gin and tonic, mainly because Barb has turned me on to a variation on the theme. It's a martini with bitters and muddled cilantro. Better than it sounds.
