Spain 2022: April 10th San Francisco to Barcelona

 The ultra cheap flights from years past were gone, but I spotted an Iberia Airlines direct flight in the realm of $700 a person for Spring Break. Spring break is too short to bring the triplet, but it was sufficient for Bowen, Boen and Xiaoqin to get a feel for Barcelona and Girona. I also decided that since I didn't manage to make it to Cadaques last time to visit the Salvador Dali House Museum, I'd make up for it this time. The Costa Brava had impressed me the last time as well, so I'd show it to them as well.

Our flight was late by nearly two hours--I would later find out that this was par for the course for Iberia Airlines --- the airline company, LEVEL, serviced Iberia's San Francisco to Barcelona direct flight, and was famous online for a level of disorganization that led to frequent trip delays and vocal unhappy customers.

I'd discovered that booking.com now offered a taxi service, which for what my AirBnB host told me, was comparable to just showing up at the airport and booking a taxi, but the taxi driver would show up and greet us as we exited baggage claim! We cleared customs with astounding efficiency. To my surprise, our vaccination cards weren't even checked! Arriving at the AirBnB, we had been told that the host would greet us, but instead her cleaning crew was responsible for letting us in and giving us the keys. The cleaning person was an obvious immigrant, and she kindly let us know the wifi password, gave us the keys, and then left us to our own devices.

The kids were very excited about the balcony, but we were all very hungry, so we immediately absconded to buy some groceries for breakfast (I was pretty sure we would awake long before any grocery stores would open because of jet lag), and then walked over to La Tasqueta de Blai, and had what would turn out to be the best tapas of the entire trip!

Next to the restaurant was a gelato shop, that was similarly excellent. We walked back to the apartment, took showers, and took melatonin pills before going to bed, hoping that the jet-lag gods would grant us an exception.