... and parts north.

I don't have a lot to say about Barcelona except that it didn't really click with me and I think Sally and I would have enjoyed it a lot more without the children. We did have a nice view from our apartment

and shopping can be fun.

but we were more relaxed when we left the city and headed north to the area around Figueres (which the learned amongst you will know as Dali's hometown).

It wasn't all sweetness and light though. About fifty yards from our front door was the local church. This was a quaint tower with a clock and what's that? Bells! First there were the dings. One for quarter past, two for half past, three for quarter to and four for top of the hour (DJ school showing through). Then, of course, the hour would strike, but due to some eccentricity in the earth's orbit, or perhaps some Castillian time and Catalan time thing, the hour would strike again about a minute later. This is OK during the day, but at night it was a little, well, irritating. It wouldn't keep you awake, but if you were trying to get to sleep, it would keep reminding you that you had been lying there for an hour and fifteen, no thirty, minutes now and it was getting on for four o'clock.

It was especially tiresome when a) the small child in your arms had just drifted off at one minute to eleven and there followed a four ding and twenty-two dong salute to your success in getting her to sleep and b) when you have some sort of weird flu-like illness and are lying awake for hours with a raging temperature (a condition that is alleviated somewhat by the entertaining fever dreams -- remind me to tell you the one about the royal birthday party).

So, not one of the most successful holidays, but there were highlights (Dali being one of them) and while Barcelona was a bit of a let down, we felt that perhaps that was our fault. How could you not like a city where three year olds go on outings to the Miro museum? Culture, they have it in spades that lot.