Trek to Barcelona & Lourdes

So we were up before 5am this morning, the earliest morning so far on our trip, but for good reasons. We needed to start our long day of many train rides to get from the west of France to the Northeast of Spain. We first took a train about 3 hours to Lourdes where we planned to stop off for a while.

At Lourdes, the Basilica was celebrating the 150th anniversary of Bernadette’s apparitions in the grotto (which is right next to/underneath the Basilica). When we got off our train we saw more nuns than at world youth day. Accompanying them were nurses. When we walked down to the Basilica area we found out that on this location is a hospital, a hospice, numerous chapels, and, of course, the grotto. We watched as elders were wheeled around by volunteers and people were getting water from the fountains. Although it was rainy this afternoon, we made the best of it and went to Mass. We got some water ourselves to bring back to the States and then had a nice lunch. Unfortunately, Matt had a fall walking down from the top of the Cathedral. Even though crocs are the best, we need to get new ones because Matt has worn the tread down to basically nothing. Not a nice combination with wet, steep, stone stairs. Matt’s okay but the rest of the day sitting wasn’t the most comfortable.

We grabbed our packs from storage and then took our next train to Toulouse where we needed to catch a connecting train in less than 10 minutes. Running from platform to platform is easy since we are used to it but still very stressful! We took this next train across country to Narbone, our last stop in France (which we were thankful for after all the weeks in France up to this point!) We had about 25 minutes to get our next train so we grabbed a sandwich. Kristen put her small bag down for a minute to think about what to order. Some frenchman came right up and made Kristen nervous because he was a little rude. When she bent down to pick up her bag this man was very rude and, for the first time since we started in France, a french person stuck up for us! The lady behind the counter said some harsh sounding words to him but we don’t know what she said since it was in French. Oh well.. We walked away and ate quickly.

On our last train we had about 4 hours along the east coast of France into Spain. We saw the Med Sea were excited to see flamingos in the bay. As Matt was listening to the Ipod Kristen heard the couple sitting behind them speaking English. So excited, she turned around and asked where they were from. Los Angeles! And they were backpacking, too! How rare to meet other American backpackers (we can count the number we met on one hand).. The four of us chatted for a long time and hopefully if they are reading this they will see their “shout out”. (We hope you had a great time in Cinque Terre!!!)

When we arrived in Barcelona station we were on alert for pickpockets since Barcelona is known to be the worst city in Europe for this. We were sized up several times but decided that at 10pm not to take the subway, and rather to spend a bit more and just get a taxi. We got to a nice hotel near the airport. The nicest on our whole trip so far! We decided to sleep early since we needed to wake early to go to the airport to greet Anne, Bob, Kate, Fran, Lorraine, and Reggie!