A Proper Day In Barcelona
Start of the week, I get my stuff together and ride my bike to the train station and take the train into Barcelona. Today is determined bike riding day. When I get to Passeig de Gracia station in Barcelona I start biking north.
And bike straight into a hill. See my objective is Parc Guinardo which is supposed to have some old air raid shelters from the Revolution, but I mistakenly believed the Repubicans would avoid putting their shelters on GIANT EXPOSED HILLS. I walk a pretty good chunk of this but it quickly becomes worth it as the vista is incredible. I have photos for an entire additional panorama that I don’t need because the view just kept improving as you climbed up.
Eventually I found the air raid shelters (actually bunkers with emplacements for anti-aircraft guns, turns out I confused this with another site) which are actually sort of open and you can walk around. The entire site is coated in graffiti, most of it pretty good. After I head along the hill to Parc Carmel and Parc Guell since I can see them without losing too much of my height before the ride back to the center of the city. I whiz thru Parc Carmel which is better maintained that Parc Guinardo, but ultimately less pretty in my opinion. At some point I cross into Parc Guell and then all of a sudden BLAM walls of tourists. I have no idea that I am in Anton Guadi’s park, all I know is these damned tourists are ruining what would be a fucking awesome roadway to cruise down. They force me to stop periodically and I realize the roadway itself is kind of cool and take photos. I miss most of the rest of the park and zip past the Sagrada Familia then turn around and take some photos there too. I’m pretty set though, I get to the coast and head towards Parc Montjuic.
Within this Parc is a cemetery that contains the graves of Francisco Ferrer y Guardia (founder of the Modern School), Francisco Ascaso (died fighting the fascist uprising), and Buenaventura Durruti (a solid anarchist who deserves to be on everyones t-shirts more than Che Gueverra). I am roundly defeated in my quest for the graves by the fact that the Parc itself is enormous, on another giant hill, and there is no good signage to find the cemetery. Eventually it is getting too late to continue so I ride back into town. I manage to find the Plaza of the Unknown Soldier when I get back to La Rambla. This was somewhat chancy and I begin to get annoyed with the Spanish and apparently Catalonian resistance to signing their Civil War history. The Plaza is special because it was one of many named during the Revolution (much as Gran Via in Madrid used to be CNT Street), but most of those plaza and street markings were scrubbed clean when the fascists won. This plaza marking survived because it got covered up just before the fascists won and survived all the years of dictatorship until finally they were renovating the church and discovered the sign. And there it is today, a simple painted reminder that someone else named the streets here once.
I head around doing some tasks, like picking up some posters from the CNT bookstore for the Anarchist Bookfair Silent Auction (getting those onto my bike was fun!), getting sent to three different Movistar outlets before I found out that to fix my phone I just had to restart it (I’m not used to firmware with significant OS bugs!), and then it was time to head back to Granollers.
I’m already an hour behind when I wanted to leave, which sucks because I’m going to try it on my bike again because I’m pretty sure I know how I screwed up last time. I am well into twilight when I screw up differently and end up heading towards Vilanova de Valles which is going a bit too far east and putting an extra hill between me and Granollers. Rather than backtracking along the road I bike on the service roads in the adjacent fields in the near-dark. That was really refreshing… in fact the entire ride had been an improvement, though it helps not to have the bags. Eventually I get back on course but get a bit turned around in an industrial area. I push past a construction barricade intending to just hop back onto the legit pavement on the other side of it when I realize the soon to be paved road seems to go in my direction… but right now its just gravel. So do I stay or do I go? What if it just ends (this has happened too many times already and by now we’re in night)? Fortunately I notice a guy walking along the construction so I ask him and I miss about half of the details but it seems like I should just follow the road and eventually I get to Granollers. And it works! I arrive triumphantly in Granollers and pick up some donairs for Sonia and I.