Valencia and El Vendrell
27th December, 4.30 a.m. Over the last few days, apart from Christmas shopping and Christmas Day here in Barcelona, we have had a couple of excursions out of town. On the Tuesday we took a day trip on the train to Valencia. Three hours on the train heading down the coastline of Spain and we were there. As is our habit, we took the hop-on hop-off bus to see the sights of the city. For part of the trip we missed the historic buildings, we were too busy watching to make sure the mad bus driver hadn’t run down the people of pedestrian crossings etc. A couple of close calls with other vehicles as well.
Yesterday we took a couple more train trips. The first was to Tibidabo where we took the cable car to the top to see Barcelona spread below us. A magnificent view. The finicular goes higher but wasn’t working today, but we wonder how the view could possibly be improved by going higher anyway. We thought then we would go to Tarragona to enjoy an afternoon at the beach but the train apparently was to stop just before that at St Vicenc de Calders so we thought we would head for there. But the train kept going and going, and we wondered just how far it would go so we got off at a town called El Vendrell. It felt like something of an adventure just taking a spur of the moment punt and getting off the train in an unknown town. We discovered El Vendrell is considered something of a tourist town but we can’t quite work out why, exactly. It turned out we were only another 5 minutes train ride from our intended destination.