Spain – The Traveling Honeymooners

Mrs. Traveling Honeymooners grandparents were celebrating a very special anniversary recently and chose to spend it with our family. After pondering what a family of thirteen people could do all together, we came up with the idea to take a Windstar cruise!

Before we get ahead of ourselves here, we are a bit of a picky crowd because we all LOVE to travel, eat good food and cruising. We have been on multiple cruises in our lifetime, on a variety of cruise lines. With that being said, we knew we wanted something really special for this trip. Mrs. Traveling Honeymooner’s Aunt had been on a Windstar Cruise along the Dalmatian Coast the previous year and loved every second of it. Thats really all she talked about for about a year so the rest of us figured we needed to try out a Windstar Cruise.

Benefits of Traveling on a Windstar Cruise:

The ships are more like yachts and typically hold between 200-350 people or less
The food is fantastic
The service is fantastic
Every room is an exterior room
The stops are well planned and all have a lot to offer

Our Itinerary:

Click here to see our Itinerary

We also used Rosie Goldberger from Vanguard travel to help us plan our day trips and accommodations in Barcelona and Lisbon.

Our family loves history and exploring historical sites so we spent a majority of time exploring at each port.

Barcelona

To learn more about our time in Barcelona click here. We spent three days in Barcelona before setting sail on our cruise and enjoyed every minute of it.

Tarragona

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Ibiza

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Cartagena

We docked in Cartagena on Sunday so many of the restaurants and stores were closed. However, we were able to tour a few historical sites and wonder the streets before heading back to the boat. The weather in Cartagena was beautiful and made it easy for us to explore. fullsizeoutput_97ee

Granada

One of the highlights of our trip was visiting the Alhambra. The pictures we took do not even begin to do justice to this beautiful place. We hired a private driver and tour guide and took a day trip from port and it was one of the coolest things any of us had ever experienced. I would highly recommend hiring a driver and a tour guide if you plan on visiting the Alhambra.

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Malaga

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Tangier

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Lisbon

We had so much fun on our cruise and would take another Windstar Cruise in a heartbeat.

Thanks for stopping by!

XOXO,

Traveling Honeymooners

Barcelona is one of our favorite cities! There is so much to do and see, the people are kind and the weather is beautiful! Mr. Traveling Honeymooner studied abroad in Barcelona many moons ago and fell in love with the city during his stay.

Our first trip to Barcelona together was back in August 2014 and ever since then we have wanted to go back! We were finally able to make it back to this beautiful city this past June. To celebrate Mrs. Traveling Honeymooner’s grandparents anniversary, the entire family decided to take a cruise out of Barcelona, so we chose to go a few days early to spend some time in one of our favorite places.

Accommodations:

Hotel Midmost Barcelona

Address: Carrer de Pelai, 14, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

We enjoyed our stay at Hotel Midmost. The rooms were a fair size, the breakfast buffet had a variety of foods to choose from, and the staff was very kind and helpful. The best part about the hotel was the location. Hotel Midmost is centrally located and is about two blocks from Las Rambles Street and is surrounded by shopping, restaurants and the Metro. It was very easy to get to all of the sites we wanted to see and it was easy to get a taxi at anytime during the day.

Our Sites:

Since Mrs. Traveling Honeymooner’s family had never been to Barcelona, we wanted them to experience the entire city in the short amount of time we had there so we decided to take a bike tour of the city. We had gone on this bike tour back in 2014 and loved it so we decided to take our family along for another tour. We used Fat Tire Bike Tours for our private tour. We saw so many sites and biked over 15 miles. Our group is pretty fit and all of us enjoy being outside and being active so we were OK with biking this much, but the guides would be willing to go at whatever pace works for you. Our family also loves history so our guide spent a significant amount of time telling us all about the history of each site we saw. I wish I would have taken more pictures of all the beautiful sites we saw. I guess we will have to go back!

Tip: If you are traveling as a duo or small group, we recommend joining a group tour because you get to meet lots of people which is always fun. This is is what we chose to do in 2014. The downside is that you do not move as fast and may not have as much flexibility in the sites you want to see.

Fat Tire Bike Tours

Address: Carrer de Marlet’, 4, 08002 Barcelona, Spain

For the rest of the trip we chose to visit some of the sites that we did not get to go into during the bike tour.

We also surprised out Grandparents with a photoshoot at Parc Guell to commemorate our trip. I found the photographer on Fly Photography

Fly Photography is a super easy to use website that links travelers to a photographer in the city where they will be traveling. We loved our photographer and the pictures he took and found the service to be fairly reasonable and very reliable. Here are some photos from our photo shoot at Parc Guell! If you go to Barcelona, Parc Guell is a site to see.