Spain 2020: Activities Planning

NOTE -> This trip occurred pre-COVID-19 and feels like 100 years ago

We didn’t do a great job planning activities for this trip. We knew many people who had been there and asked everyone we could for their advice and suggestions… but we never made any firm decisions about what we were actually going to do. That made things challenging for what we would do our first day and the rest of the time we’d be in Barcelona in particular.

The only thing we had firmly planned was going to an FC Barcelona soccer game. The boys are soccer fanatics and Tomatico in particular knows all the players on seemingly all the teams. He’s passionate! We knew he would love going to a game in person and I researched if that was possible. I checked the schedule and as it turned out there was a home game the day after we arrived. Valencia and Madrid did not have games when we were in those cities so this was our only opportunity to see a game in person.

After asking my wife’s brother, who is a Barcelona fanatic and has seen several games, I looked for tickets on the FC Barcelona website. He said it was the most reliable place to get tickets and you could print them out rather than having to go to the ticket office to pick up the physical tickets like you would from some other sites I found.

I spent weeks agonizing over what sections to get tickets in. You don’t have the option to pick specific seats. Those are assigned by the club, but the site shows you the sections and the prices. Over the weeks I was thinking about it, the prices naturally went up but about a week before we left I finally pulled the trigger. I bought tickets in a corner section even with one of the corner flags, though at the time I didn’t know which corner flag.

I got a receipt immediately in my inbox telling me the ticket details and seats would be emailed to me in the days before the game. Right on schedule, we got the confirmation of the tickets and the seat assignments which were in row 3 in the lowest section of the stadium. I’m sure we’d have an excellent view of Messi. Hopefully he would be playing in this game!!!!

The morning of our flight, we still didn’t have anything booked. I had several ideas for what we could do lined up so once my wife gave me the green light I booked activities for the first and second day.

The first thing I booked was a guided tour of Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral that multiple people had put first on their “must do” lists. There were self guided and audio tours available as well, but the boys generally like guided tours so I took the plung and got tickets for that. The only available time that worked for us was 12:30 on our day of arrival. That wasn’t ideal, but I hoped we could make it work.

The second thing I booked was a self guided tour of Parc Guell the morning of our second day at the first available time at 10:00am. All the recommendations were to get there as soon as it opens because it can get fully quickly. The idea would be to do the park in the morning, then head downtown to see the city center and get something to eat before heading out to the Barcelona game. For our third day we’ll leave that free to figure out whatever came up.

In Valencia we didn’t have any firm plans, but knew we wanted to visit the downtown, the beach and the science park, all of which were within easy reach of our hotel.

In Madrid we had more time, but even few plans as for what to do so we’d be playing that by ear almost 100%. That’s abnormal for us, but my wife speaks the language and we’d be in the center of town so we weren’t worried we’d be able to figure it out more or less on the fly.