Okay… Alitalia… We may just have Marci add this to our “never again” list of airlines. First off, they only allowed 20 kg. per passenger. Well, when you pack for 18 days of vacation (cruise included), you are going to have more than 20 kg. After paying an arm and a leg for “extra baggage,” we ended up sitting on the runway for 90 minutes (the flight was only supposed to be 105 minutes) before they could take off because they couldn’t get anyone to sign off on the boarding. Then when we finally landed, we waited almost another 30 minutes for a bus to come and pick us up from the plane. Oh, and that extra baggage cost? Well, we were lucky and got all of our luggage. Many people ended up boarding the ship without any of bags as they were scattered around London, Rome and/or Madrid.
One of the funniest things about the Alitalia flight, was when an Italian businessman just started in on one of the flight attendants in Italian. He was clearly upset and being very animated in his side of the conversation. When he finished, he felt the need to do it again, in English, so all of the tourists on the plane could hear what he said. We felt sorry for him since he was delayed more than 12 hours from Naples to Barcelona – a flight that is not much different from Seattle to San Francisco.
Anyway, we made it to the ship and got checked in. Once we got a bit settled, we hopped off and grabbed a Taxi to go into Barcelona. We popped by Cathedral to see how it looked with all the scaffolding off – last November it was being restored. It was still being worked on, but we got some good photos anyway.
Before heading back to the ship for our safety drill, we walked over to La Rambla and then down towards the port. This is such a wonderful area, and we were sad to have as little time as we did.
