If you are looking for a guidebook with what to do and when, prices and family-friendly activities, you are in the wrong place. If you really want that, our contact info. is up at the top, feel free to shoot an email. We don’t do the whole guided tour, hop-on-hop-off-the-bus kind of thing. Rick Steves probably already did that better anyways. (Again, someone with money and time. It helps.)

When we travel, we tend to get up at dawn, stay out until about the same time, and do our best to blend into the local culture.

While the main sights in Barcelona are incredible, they are also incredibly expensive. Though the rock of Sagrada Familia (the crazy church, you know.) reaches unfinished towards the heavens, the street below is crowded with tour buses, souvenir shops and hucksters.

At Casa Bastilló, another Gaudi creation (He’s a famous architect, look it up.), lines of people swirl and stumble like the sculpture above as people wait to spend about 25 euros to look at the lobby of someone else’s apartment building.

Even at Park Guell (I guess I’m on a Gaudi thing today), which is mostly worth the trek for the view of the city and the neighborhood that surrounds it, entrance will cost you about 15 euros and a long wait to see; at least the part that you always see pictures of. The part that is free winds through wooded paths with bridges and caves carved into the mountainside, where each view of the city reveals something new. While outside the paid part taxis honk and tourists choke the street for the perfect selfie spot.

The point that I am trying to make, and I think one of our main goals with this trip, is that you do not need money to laugh with loved ones on the beach. Buying momentos and souvenirs will not help you remember the way that they early-autumn night sky felt; just checking off spots and museums on a list will not bring you any closer to the soul of a place. The farther you go, the closer you become to each other.

If you want to see and do those kinds of things, then by all means, please do. (I don’t want to sound like such an asshole). Just remember that the exchange rate doesn’t work in your favor.

My advice for those traveling through Barcelona, or really most other cities around the world, would be to allow yourself to get lost; to step out of whichever place you left behind and for a moment have nowhere to go and nothing to do. The spirit of Barcelona and of the open road lay down crooked alleyways and cramped bars with cheap food and good conversation or in beers shared with new friends and fellow travelers on late-night patios*.

Anyways, we say goodbye to Barcelona and the first leg of our trip tomorrow. This city hold a piece of me always, but goddamn, right now I just can’t afford it. We will be heading to the Andalusia region of Spain, to the cities of Granada and Cordoba. See y’all soon!

*As long as you are not causing a scene, you should be fine to drink a store-bought (i.e. cheaper) bottle of wine in the park or beach. Yeah, Europeans have the whole drinking thing figured out.