Arriving in Barcelona, a traveler's tale

<warning>Non techy stuff follows</warning>

This year we decided to bring the whole family to Barcelona for Tech-Ed Developers 2007. In this case whole family equals one more than last year. Let's see using anonymous types and the new c# initializer syntax that would be:

    var MyFamily = new{Dad = new Dad{Name="Glenn", Age=36}, Mom = new Mom{Name="Lana", Age=21},
        Daughter = new Daughter{Name="Sumeya", Age=3.5}} ; // Mom's are always 21 :)

AAAAH, I just lost an hours worth of this post due to a Vista BSOD, take 2 follows :(. Note to self - Save often!

OK, enough geekiness. Anyway, so the whole clan was going. At 10:00 PM on Thursday night we took off on British Airways flying out of Seatac. Lana and I were worried that we wouldn't get any sleep on the plane because Sumeya had never flown international before. 6 months ago we flew to the east coast, and she the fussiness factor was high. However, to our surprise the flight went great. Sumeya and Lana slept for about 80% of the tip. I slept about 50% and used the rest of the time to A. Catch yet another viewing of the Transformers movie (I have seen it 4 times and own it on DVD) and B. Write some code for my talk using the ASP.NET AJAX client libraries. Aaah, 90 mins of straight coding. Made me miss my old "pure" coding days.

14 hours and one London stop over later we arrived in BCN, jetlagged and exhausted. Hola! Here's a few candid shots of us arriving at BCN airport much to the dismay of my wife who is doing her best to hide from the press.

Barcelona 2007 007Barcelona 2007 001  Barcelona 2007 002

Next after a LONG wait for our bags, we headed off to our hotel. We're staying at 3 hotels while in Barcelona. First on the list is the Vincci Martimo. It's a great hotel with nice modern decor. It's minimalist, which seems to be common for many of the hotels here. It's about a half a mile from the conference center which allows me to get that small bit of exercise every day. The room is really nice, with a good view and a great shower including a nice deep tub where one (or two) can lounge in a hot bath after a tough day of intensive sessions. (That is if the little girl decides to go to bed)

After checking in, and relaxing for a bit, we decided to eat in the hotel restaurant because it was getting late. I knew what I wanted, so I quickly scanned the menu. There it was "Seafood Paella". When you order Paella most places require you to get an order for two. The more the merrier. The food was "muy delicioso" and looked something like this....

paella.jpg

Finally we headed off to bed (or so we thought). My daughter apparently had an abundance of energy built up from all the sleep on the plane. We were ready for bed, and she was ready to go out on the town. We told her it was time to go to bed and tomorrow she'll get to see lost of fun places, and play with kids from Barcelona. After 3 1/2 hours of tossing and turning and "Sumeya, go to bed", she finally fell out, and so did we.