It was hard to get out of bed the morning we left Valencia after as little as 5 hours of sleep. We enjoyed a lovely last breakfast in Valencia before we walked to the train station. I, Nina, had prepared this trip a little bit and prebooked the train tickets (as prebooked tickets are much cheaper), but I realised that I did not do my homework properly. By arriving at the train station (20 minutes before the departure of the train) we realised that Valencia actually has 2 train stations! What a shock. We hurried out to the taxi stand and asked a random taxi driver. The man was so very friendly and told us, that the other station is just a 5 minute-walk away. He pointed us the direction and said, it will be cheaper and quicker if we walk. Amazing! Honest and friendly people still do exist! But we were really happy that we just had to hurry up walking to the other station. For the first moment we expected that the other train station is on the other side of town. So, no problem, we managed to get on the train in time. .....and we were heading north again.
Our final destination for the day was Castelldefels, a little town on the outskirts of Barcelona. In fact, it is the town where famous Lionel Messi is living. We had booked a room there because it was much cheaper than in Barcelone itself and only a 20 minute train ride away from Plaza de Catalunya. Anyway, we had a train ticket only taking us to Tarragona. It was 2/3 of the way and we thought it would be nice to split up the journey and see a bit more of the Catalonia. So far we have just spend time in Barcelona and do not know anything of this part of Spain. After sleepy 2 hours in the train we arrived in Tarragona and got of the train. We looked for luggage lockers as everywhere in Spain they have them. Everywhere - but not in Tarragona. OK, we did not have a lot of luggage (2 small rolleys - not even backpacks this time), but it was not really handy to carry them around with us. But this is what we did. We did sightseeing with our luggage! Felt stupid but was the only way we could do it. How lucky we were that the pavements in Tarragona are really very well made and maintained :-).
From the train station it was a short walk uphill in the direction of the old town. We had a wonderful view over the sea, the beach and the train station. When you travel passed Tarragona the train station is amazing as it feels like driving through the sand. But when you are in Tarragona it is a shame to have the ugly train station so close to the beach (and it is noisy as well). Anyway the views from Placa del Rei over the beach are really nice. The town was full of daytrippers from the nearby beaches. But the small old town is really beautiful. Around midday, it was busy with locals who just visited the market on Placa de la Seu and went to one of the many tapas bars. We loved the old buildings and the architecture, visited the cathedral and settled down in one of the restaurants for a nice gazpacho lunch. This is a cold soup of cucumber and tomatoes accompanied by some fresh bred and a nice beer. For us, without alcohol. It is amazing, Spain, the beer drinking country has a bigger variety of non-alcoholic beers (even dark ones) than Switzerland has with "normal" beers. We loved it! We enjoyed the atmosphere and just watched life in the streets passing by. Later we continued our walk through town and ended on the main square, Placa de la Font, where we enjoyed some ice cream. In the late afternoon it was time to continue our trip north. We really liked Tarragona. It is a nice town a good destination for 1 - 2 days.
We took a local train to St. Vicenc where we had to change to another train which brought us to Castelldefels within 1 hour. In Castelldefels we had to walk some more till we finally reached our accomodation. We have to admit that at the end of the day we were very happy to leave luggage - our arms were aching a bit of all the "walking around with the luggage" :-). Sightseeing with the luggage is really not the best idea.
More about our time in Castelldefels, Barcelona and Montserrat in another blog.