Wedenesday, June 27th, was the LONGEST day ever.
Typically, we leave in the morning or early afternoon. Today, our flight was at 8pm to Barcelona, Spain….
Our car picked us up at 3:30pm headed to JFK, we are TSA Pre-Checked, so we breezed through security and had some time on our hands. We grabbed dinner at Shake Shack and headed for the Delta Lounge to wait a bit until our flight was ready to board.
The girls sat next to each other and Mikey was my seat buddy. Mike was behind me, sitting next to another teenager (flying alone) who had the window seat.
The flight was pretty uneventful, I tried to sleep but could only nap a bit- whereas Mikey had no problem sleeping away. We were fed twice- dinner and breakfast. Plus snacks when we boarded.
Once we landed, on June 28th, we gathered our luggage and found our driver to take us to the Hilton Diagonal Mar (we set the ride up through the hotel).
Our driver was super nice, but could barely communicate with us. The van was huge- which we appreciated after a long flight and feeling cramped for so many hours.
The ride was less than a half hour and went quite smoothly.
First impressions of the hotel were incredibly positive- the lobby was spotless and spacious.
Checking in… well. We had problems. Traveling as a family of 5 is always hard, outside of Disney properties. We booked a king room and a twin room with pool views.
We had contacted the hotel several times with a request to connect or be next door to each other and were never told this option was impossible, until we checked in. Not only was that impossible, but the room categories were sold out and they did not have any rooms available next door to each other. After some back and forth, we were upgraded to 1 room that fit the 5 of us- a Panoramic Suite on the 17th floor with access to their Concierge Lounge- at no additional charge as we had already paid months ago and are Hilton Honors Members as well.
By now, we were starving! Across the street was a shopping mall- with a McDonalds!
We assumed using the electronic ordering, it would be easier with our language barrier- but its wasn’t. We had a problem paying, then once that was settled- we weren’t given all of the food we ordered- so we had to adjust that. We took our order to go and ate at the table inside our suite.
Once full, we decided to nap… and woke up in time for some Tapas in the Concierge Lounge!
For dinner, we headed back across the street to La Tagliatella, a friend took this very same trip 3 weeks before and recommeded this place very highly. So, in we went and didn’t regret it!
We got back to our hotel and up into our suite- with the most beautiful views…
We turned on our TV, which luckily had Netflix, watched The Incredibles and tried to fall back asleep. It wasn’t easy and we were all up (except Mikey) on and off most of the night.
We needed to sleep as the next day we had scheduled a pretty busy Barcelona day…
