Jenfifi's travel blogs:
- San Juan Puerto Rico 2009
- Peru: Trekking the Salkantay Trail to Machu... 2008
- Tour de Europa 2007-BAR TRIP! 2007
- Hawaii! 2007
- Korea! 2007
- Spring Break 2007- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2007
- Spring Break 2007 - Singapore, Singapore 2007
- Spring Break 2007- Tanjung Pinang and Palau... 2007
- Spring Break 2007- Bangkok, Thailand 2007
- A semester abroad... 2007
- 10 days in China for business and... 2006
- Cleveland, July 2006 2006
- 4th of July 2006 in Chicago, IL 2006
- Summer of 2006 in New York City... 2006
- Mom, Aunt Sandy, and I do Paris. 2006
- Carnival Cruise through to Colon Panama, Belize... 2006
- New Years trip 2005-2006, Quebec City, Quebec 2005
- Couples Ocho Rios, Jamaica: December of 2005 2005
- An SA trip to remember! 2002
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Last day in Spain :(
Entry 24 of 28 | show all | print this entry |
Oh no, our last day in Spain! Today we decided to take a little trip out of town to a small historic beach town called Tarragona, about an hour and a half outside of Barcelona. We decided to check out and leave our bags in lockers at the train station since our hotel was rather far from the station so we wouldn't have to go back there later. When we arrived at the station there were signs for lockers but the staff there told us they were closed for some reason. So, we had to take our packs on the train and head out. We left around 10:30 from Franca station and on the way there were serenaded by annoying music coming from some teenagers' cell phones- a trend we have been noticing in public a lot in Europe. When we arrived in Tarragona there were once again signs for lockers. However, we were then informed by the staff at Tarragona station that in fact ALL of the train station lockers in the entire country had been shut down by the government for security reasons! We had no where to put out huge bags. Our first solution was to try to rent a car for the day so we could drive around freely and keep our bags in the trunk. Hertz, however, quoted is 100 euro for only 6 hours with their cheapest available car, and Avis was closing at noon and wouldn't let us drop it off later than that. All we could do is head out into town and try to see if we could check them at a hotel or hostel. After trying several hotel and hostels who informed us that their luggage rooms were full- due to other travelers which had no bag storage at the train station- we were very discouraged. Along the way we kept running into one other couple with the exact same predicament. Finally, the four of us agreed that we would rent the cheapest room available and put our luggage there for the day. It worked out to about 12 euro each between the four of us to rent a double room at a hostel- which was actually comparable to the bag check we did at the train station in Florence. Once this was finally settled, with several hours of our day already behind us, we could finally eat lunch. We were so starving from this ordeal that we went to one of the first places we found and had a rather horrendous meal. Oh well, off to explore! Tarragona was the Roman capital in Spain and is older than the major cities. There are amazing Roman ruins here, supposedly the largest in Europe outside of Rome. For no admission fee we rendered through a beautiful huge Roman amphitheatre right along the ocean and then paid only 1.20 Euro each to go to the neighboring archeological museum which was great. From there we explored an old castle and part of the ancient city walls. This town was very charming but for some reason- we aren't sure if it is because it was Saturday or the European August vacation time- NOTHING was open. Almost every single cute shop lining the streets was totally closed up. We were able to find a grocery store where we picked up some "cava", a Spanish sparkling wine drink which is popular and I had been wanted to try. Of course they had no ice or cold drinks so we had t pay at a McDonalds for a cup of ice. From there we decided to walk to the beautiful beach to spend the rest of our afternoon. Getting to the beach turned out to be quite difficult- the town has literally build their railroad tracks between the town and the coastline so that you have to walk a long way to get to an underpass in order to get there. Once we were there it was beautiful- not to crowded, rather uncommercial, and the water was SO blue! As evening came we had to drag ourselves away to get back to the hostel to pick up our bags and then to the train station. The hostel where we were paying to keep our bags was very ironic in that it was the ONLY hostel we have paid for on the entire trip with AID CONDITIONING, not to mention it had a private bathroom and was brand new and remodeled. I wish we could have stayed here! Anyway, we got back on the train around 6 to make it back to catch our overnight train to Paris- which was the same kind of train we took to Barcelona only THANK GOD had working air conditioning. When we got on this train we looked at our schedule and realized that we had screwed up the dates when booking the last few nights of our trip- we had booked Paris for tonight and had to cancel a night on Brussels! WEe couldn't get a hold of the hostels on the train though so had to resign to taking care of it tomorrow and hoping for the best!
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