Tag Archives: Barcelona

Drinking with a View

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Whether we’re abroad or in our own city of Bakersfield, Ryan and I love to sip drinks and eat snacks while taking in a view.  I received an email this morning from Fodor’s with a link to an article about the 10 best hotel bars with a view in Europe.  It’s great timing because we’ll be visiting three of the cities this fall!

In Lisbon, the article recommends the BA Terrace at the Bairro Alto Hotel.  This was already on my radar after reading about it in a Trip Advisor forum post.  Since our Lisbon itinerary is fairly relaxed (we plan to do a lot of exploring in the different neighborhoods), there will hopefully be time for us to visit this bar and enjoy the fantastic view!

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Portugal and Spain: How we are spending our time

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The Westin Palace hotel, Madrid, Spain

The Westin Palace, Madrid – our hotel for two nights.

For our upcoming trip to Portugal and Spain, we will be gone for a total of 13 nights.  While I originally wanted to stick to three or four cities, it was so hard to limit the options.  I want to share the itinerary for our two week vacation, since we’ve been sharing bits and pieces of the travel-planning process:

Lisbon, Portugal – 3 nights

  • Arriving: around 8:30am at the Lisbon Airport
  • What to Do: explore the neighboorhoods, enjoy the food and wine (and hopefully experience Fado!), visit Belém, visit Sintra (as a day trip)
  • Leaving: around 9:30 from the Lisbon Airport

Barcelona, Spain – 3 nights

  • Arriving: around 12:30 at the Barcelona airport
  • What to Do: nothing is set in stone, but we plan on visiting some of the popular sights like Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, hanging out at the beach, exploring La Rambla, enjoying tapas
  • Leaving: around 9:30am – this ticket is already booked! Check out Ryan’s post here on direct online booking to potentially save a lot of money on train tickets. 

Sevilla, Spain – 2 nights

  • Arriving: around 2:00pm at the Sevilla train station
  • What to Do: Alcazar, Flamenco, food!
  • Leaving: We aren’t sure yet.  There are a few train options we’re looking at – one leaving around 7am, one that would leave around 9:30am and one that would leave around 12pm.

Granada, Spain – 3 nights

  • Arriving: Depends on the train we decide to take from Sevilla, but we would get in around 10:30am, 1:30pm, or 3pm at the Granada train station.
  • What to Do: the Alhambra, a possible day trip to Nerja
  • Leaving: around 9:00am from the Granada train station.  This ticket has also already been booked. 

Madrid, Spain – 2 nights

  • Arriving: around 1:30pm at the Madrid train station
  • What to Do: tapas, tapas, tapas! Ok, and the Royal Palace, Prado, and 
  • Staying: At The Westin Palace, Madrid.  This is the only hotel we haven’t written a post on, so I wanted to share the information now.  Long story short:  Starwood had a “points and cash” option for the nights we will be staying (pay partially with starpoints, partially with “cash” in USD – this is usually an awesome deal) and we couldn’t pass it up.  The location is great, so honestly, we didn’t even look at other options. 
  • Leaving: around 11:30am from the Madrid airport.

We’ll continue to do research on activities, places to eat, and things to see, but we look forward to changing our plans according to what we want to do while we’re there!

Starwood Hotels in Barcelona

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Ryan and I are in the beginning stages of planning our next vacation. We actually started talking about it before our honeymoon, because there is nothing more depressing than coming back from a long vacation and having nothing to look forward to. There are several places we want to visit (especially in Europe) and we decided that 2012 would be the year for a Spain trip! We’ve done some preliminary research and we think we’ve decided on some destinations. However, the city we started with was Barcelona! We aren’t sure at which hotel we are going to stay, but we want to stay at a Starwood hotel (and use points) to save money.

hotel barcelona spain W

I found this hotel when we first starting talking about Spain and I fell in love! I’m a sucker for ocean views and large rooms with balconies. This hotel is 20,000 starpoints/night, which would be 60,000 (assuming we stay 3 nights). We have the points and could use them, but there are other hotels we’ve been thinking about staying at, and it would be nice to save points when possible.

Pros:

  • This hotel is relatively new, so the rooms are all very nice.
  • There is a pool/bar area which looks fabulous!
  • The views from this hotel are breathtaking.

Cons:

  • Location. It’s not as centrally-located as the other option.
  • We would use 60,000 starpoints, instead of saving some for a different trip.
  • There is no guarantee that we’ll get a nice room overlooking the ocean. I am a gold member, but upgrades are not guaranteed, and we’ll be going during the summer/fall, which is a popular time to visit. So, the hotel will still have nice views, but maybe not from our room.

Le Meridien Barcelona, Spain hotel

Pros:

  • Location is great – right off of Las Ramblas, which is the place to be in Barcelona.
  • This is “only” 16k starpoints per night, so we’d save 12k starpoints, assuming we stay 3 nights.
  • Recent renovations by https://fdinsulation.com/crawl-space-insulation/ experts, so the rooms will be nice.

Cons:

  • No pool. I’m not sure how much time we’d spend at a pool though, so this might not be a big deal.
  • Not a nice view (city views are okay, but I wouldn’t pay big money for the view we’ll get from this hotel).

So really, we have to figure out what’s important to us. Since we are early in our planning, it’s hard to know what our tentative schedule will look like. Will we have time to hang around the pool? Exactly how far away is the W, and is it going to be a huge pain? Is there an easy way to get from the W to the center of the city? Will we be going out late at night, without a way to get back to the W (if we stay there)?

(Post originally written in January 2012.  Since then we have decided to book the W Barcelona for our stay.)