Days 68 & 69 - Mataró then Train to Barcelona - Gorging in France ...Then Basquing in the Pyrenees - 2023

June 24, 2023 to June 25, 2023

Days 68 & 69 - Mataró then Train to Barcelona

Start of the Final Countdown

We’re now sitting in the departure lounge of the Barcelona airport with our flight delayed by 2hrs and 15 GB of data to eat through, so I might as well get this post written up before the days blur into a single hot mess … and it was hot.

This post covers Saturday 24th June, our second day in Materó and Sunday, our travel day into Barcelona. We’ll have two more full days in Barcelona that I’ll cover in another post before we fly home on Wednesday the 28th June.

As I already mentioned, it was hot with the temps in the low 30’s and high humidity. We did spend a bit of time at one of the beaches in Materó, the ‘dog beach’ that proved to be pretty entertaining, lots of well behaved dogs having more fun than their owners, but other than that it was a pretty low key day spent mostly trying to stay cool.

Yesterday we were really surprised by the number of firecrackers being set off everywhere we went. This continued all through the night until about 1 pm. We were wondering if this was a beach holiday thing, but it was getting to be pretty annoying.

Well it turns out that today, 24th June, is the celebration of St Joan (St John the Baptist) and it’s a big thing in Catalonia. A major part of the celebrations involves firecrackers and fireworks the night before (i.e last night) followed by a street party and dinner in every neighbourhood.

We changed hotels for today (couldn’t get two nights in the same place , probably related to this being a weekend and the St Joan celebrations) and the new hotel we were in was along Carrer St Joan. We’d find out the significance of this later in the evening.

In true Griswold fashion we found ourselves wandering around the pedestrian Ramblas area in the mid afternoon siesta … and it was a ghost town. A very hot ghost town. We decided to take a cue from the locals and head back to our hotel, with good AC, and have our own siesta.

At about 5 pm we were jarred awake by pretty loud drumming and chanting right outside our hotel. When we went out to check out what was happening there was a full-on crowded St Joan celebration going on and the ‘ghost town’ street we were on a few hours before was now a fully packed carnival with very large effigies, games for kids and a stage with a band playing. None of this was here 2 hours before!

There was nothing left for us to do but join the party, so we did.

We eventually made it up to our dinner date at Sangiovese, another Monsieur M recommended restaurant about 20 m away from where we ate last night. Tonight’s dinner was a completely different atmosphere,-more old school refinement and white linens, but the food and service was equally as good. When we were on our way back to our hotel around 10:30, the street party and dinners on Carrer Sant Joan were still in full swing. It was a nice touch to see this ‘real Mataró’ instead of the more tourist beach scene just a km away.

Our only plan for Sunday was to catch the commuter train into Barcelona, about 30 km’s and 40 minutes away. There were trains leaving every hour so we planned on catching one around noon that’s would get us into Barcelona about the same time as our Air B&B check in time.

That all went to plan. The staff at the train station were helpful in making sure we knew what to do with our bikes, and the platform we were leaving from was just a few steps away from the ticket turnstiles. This combined with a ‘roll on’ bike car made the journey pretty easy. The train was pretty crowded but everyone played ‘nice’ with us and our bikes and we were soon in Barcelona. Our ride to the B&B was about 15 minutes on well marked and controlled bike lanes and we rode right past the Sagrada Familia … one our our planned ‘sites’ for the next couple of days.

We got checked in then got our gear organized for the flight home. It was Sunday, and siesta time, so all the grocery stores and other services were closed, but we managed to find enough stuff (just) to pull together a decent pasta dinner and we sorted out where the closest post office was so we could get our bike boxes first thing tomorrow.

The end of the trip is fast approaching but we’re happy to have a couple of days to kick around this beautiful city. We were here about 20 years ago for a long weekend with our kids, but is was in March and it was very quiet. It’s now two decades later in the heat of summer so it’s going to be a whole new experience.

SOTD's - Carnival, Natalie Merchant.

Beautiful song and her video perfectly captures what we've been doing, and will continue to do over the next couple of days.