We’re just coming up on our two year anniversary in Spain. I have some time to write a bit so let me tell you about transportation. I’ll start locally in the Barcelona area and work our way out to other parts of Spain and Europe.
We actually live outside the big city, down the coast between very touristy Sitges and not very touristy Vilanova i la Geltru. We can walk to the Vilanova train station in about 30 minutes, where there are 4 local trains an hour that go into Barcelona proper. The train costs 4 euros each way at the normal retail price. {At this writing, the euro buys 1.13 to 1.15 dollars.} However, Andy & I qualify for the “Gold Card” for folks aged 60 and older. The Gold Card costs 6€ a year (yes, really, a year) and provides a discount on train travel. For us, that means a trip to Barcelona costs 2.50 each way and 5€ round-trip. Depending on which station in Barcelona is our destination, the train takes 45-50 minutes.
Throughout the province, there’s a zone system to determine how much a bus or train ticket will cost. All of Barcelona city is in one zone, which is very convenient for us. We buy single zone multi-trip tickets (called T-10’s) which do not expire. They cost 1.10€ a trip (about $1.25) and cover the buses and subway. We always have multi-trip tickets with us, so we can hop on a bus if we can’t walk or are pressed for time. The subway is also very handy for zipping from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Taken as a big picture, the public transit system in Barcelona is quite effective. We can take a train from the airport to the Vilanova station and then it’s less than a 10€ cab ride to our apartment. Figure we can make the trip for about $20 for the both of us. It takes a little time because we do have to change trains but it’s a wonderfully painless way to go to/from the airport without paying for parking or dealing with traffic. I’ve become pretty good at calling the cab company, too, to request, in Spanish, a pickup at our apartment when we’re heading out on a trip.
[Side note — Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain. At more than 2 million people, it’s about half the size of Madrid. But it’s more than 3 times the size of Valencia, the third largest city in the country. Barcelona’s relative importance in transportation and its convenience to the rest of Europe was a factor in our selecting this area to live.]
When we moved to Spain, we didn’t set any specific agenda for where we’d travel. Now, after about two years, I can tell you that the convenience has exceeded our expectations. More or less in the order we’ve visited them, here are the places we’ve touched down: Ireland, France (Paris), Germany (Bavaria), Andorra, France again, various bits of Spain, Austria, Czech Republic, Portugal (Azores and then Lisbon), Italy, Switzerland, Italy again, Malta, Italy #3, England (London).
Why Italy 3 times? First it was Tuscany and Florence. Then it was Bologna and Parma. And the third time was Sicily and “the boot.” By the way, Bologna is an underrated tourist town. We liked it a lot. It even has its own leaning tower and you can visit another country, San Marino, with a quick car ride.
Random notes in 25 words or less on the trips:
- We went to Prague just because the airfare was ridiculously cheap. We drank a lot of beer, ate great schnitzel, saw their amazing palace, and heard some lovely music.
- Our Philadelphia-based youngest son had a university trip to London between semesters so we flew up for the weekend. “I flew to London for the weekend,” is one of my favorite sentences that I have ever typed.
- Switzerland is REALLY expensive. It’s beautiful but our budget took a big hit visiting there. We won’t be doing that again anytime soon; there are plenty of other places to go.
- Ireland in August was as cold as winter at our home in Barcelona. I had to buy a jacket.
- Vienna is lovely, even in February. They turned the walking paths in a park into an ice skating route, complete with side boards and an attached skating rink.
- I will forever describe the Portuguese language as sounding like “Spanish spoken with a Russian accent.”
- Visit Malta.
- Andorra has great tax-free shopping. Getting there is annoying because of the winding roads, but I enjoyed picking up some great booze for cheap.
- Our Spain travels will get its own diary, but that will wait until next month because we’re going to three more cities next week.
- Germany has bike paths that are wider than most of the rural roads in Ireland. A mild exaggeration, but the Germans do biking right.
- We took the AVE (high speed) train to/from Paris, just to try it. It’s a little more expensive than the plane, but it’s pretty cool to go 300 km/hr (that’s upwards of 180 mph) on the ground.
We have also visited the USA four times in the past two years. It is our intent to cut back on the frequency of those visits because it’s expensive, both to fly and to stay over there, even when we’re staying with the kids or parents or friends. Airfare to the USA varies wildly by season. If you’re headed to Spain, check out Norwegian Air and TAP Portugal because they’ll sell you one-way fares, which is very convenient for flying into one city and back from another.
We’ve used American Airlines, too, because they go non-stop to Miami. Using AA requires serious shopping, though, and a straight round-trip ticket. AA code-shares with Iberia, the Spanish airline. Iberia’s planes are excellent (best coach cabin I’ve been in for a while) and if the prices/connections are similar, we’ll use them where we can.
Speaking of airfares, there are several discount airlines with major presence at BCN airport. RyanAir and Vueling (pronounced ‘welling’) are two that we’ve flown a lot. They are very much low-end cattle cars but if you’re going for 3 or 4 days and the flight is less than 2 hours, who cares how cramped it is? Stuff everything into your backpack and go. We got 30€ flights to Pisa and something like 27€ tickets to Prague. We routinely see 15€ flights to Mallorca and Ibiza. Paris is usually very inexpensive, too. Actually, most places in western Europe are cheap to fly to at one time or another, based on the season.
By way, speaking of backpacks, the Cabin Max brand backpacks are a great choice. They are huge; they hold more than a 21” carryon as best as we can tell. And they are airline-approved, meaning that they don’t check the weight and size, even on the airlines that say they have strict limits for carry-ons. Being Americans, we’ve discovered that European airlines assume we are ignorant of their rules, etc. But the Cabin Max backpacks are totally accepted and we’ve never had a single hassle with them.
This seems like a good place to mention that Barcelona is also a major cruise port. It might be the biggest cruise port in the Mediterranean. We took advantage of that last year and cruised home from Miami to Barcelona on a trans-Atlantic repositioning cruise. The crossing itself is about 6 or 7 days, but the cruise lines always stick in some port visits along the way, so you’ll need about two weeks for the whole cruise. The repositioning cruises are generally very inexpensive on a per-day basis, too. We took full advantage of the fact that cruise lines don’t care how many suitcases you have or how much they weigh, too. We brought several things (flavored coffee, flavored olive oil/vinegar, specialty canned foods) that are very expensive or difficult to get at home. Cruising also reduces jetlag to a minimum since you're adjusting your watch and your body one time zone every two days.
One more thing about traveling in Europe. There is a group of countries that have signed the wonderful Schengen Treaty. Countries in the Schengen area basically treat travel within the area as domestic. You pass through border control when you arrive from a non-Schengen country. Then there’s no customs/immigration to deal with as long as you travel within the area. The area incorporates the EU, plus Switzerland, Andorra, and a few other countries. [Nitpickers note that the UK is in the EU but has visitors do the immigration thing.] Flying from Spain to Italy is no more hassle than flying from Newark to Chicago, as far as immigration goes. Just get off the plane and go where you’re going.
The funny thing about this convenience is that we still have to take our passports with us. That’s because the airlines and hotels want to see them. In Spain, we could probably board a plane with our national identity card (which identifies us as residents of Spain but foreign citizens). But the airline and hotel staff in other countries generally want to see the passport if we’re not showing them an EU residency card. We can’t get one of those for another 3 years. So we have our passports every time we leave town. We’ve even had AirBnB hosts request to see our passports.
A final note — any of the trips we’ve taken so far would likely be worthy of its own diary or at least a few paragraphs. If you have a particular burning desire to know more about one of the places we’ve been, let me know in the comments.