Erki & Katrina hitch-hiking Europe: Valencia, Tarragona and finally Barcelona

After spending about 5 days in the amazing little house in the hills of Beas de Granada we started to head out to Barcelona. It was going to be a long trip, as Barcelona was about 800km away from us. Two Polish girls who stayed at Tom's place on our first days there actually started on the same journey couple of days earlier. They were fortunate enough to get a ride all the way to Barcelona with a Romanian truck driver. Although we didn't expect to have as much luck, we wouldn't have minded to get fairly close to Barcelona.

It actually took a while to get moving from the gas station we started of from. About 3 hours before we got a car a bit away from Granada. As usually, as soon as you get moving, things start going well. When hitchhiking on the side of the speedway we were able to get a ride with a cool guy named Jorge, who was driving from South of Spain to Valencia. He was very helpful and interesting person to be on the road with. With 500km to go to Valencia, we had a great chance to get to know him more and talk about Spain, spanish people and share some insight of Estonia.

When we got to Valencia, we were greeted by unexpectedly high humidity. It was totaly different climate compared to one we left from in the morning. Temperatures may not have been that high, but it felt fairly hot. Fortunately the airport had a good airconditioning system, so sleeping through the night wasn't too difficult. Our stay in Valencia was extremely short, as we even didn't see the center of town. Being back besides the road early in the morning.

Our first ride from Valencia took us to a small town past Castellon called Benicàssim that hosted a reggae festival at that time. As the town was filled with all kinds of reggae lovers and otherwise travelers, we fitted right in. After stopping for a small breakfast break we tried to move on closer to Barcelona. It was tricky getting cars from that point on, as we actually hitchhiked twice on a car that took us about 10 km to next closest town on both times. There also were couple of drivers who promised to take us all the way to Tarragona, but dropped us off half way there or so. But in the end we made our way to Tarragona, which was about 100km from Barcelona. As the daylight had dissapeared by that time, we had to leave those for the next day. Our night in Tarragona was spent in the local bus terminal, which was fairly ok for sleeping.

In the morning we decided to let our legs and mind rest a bit and take a bus all the way to Barcelona. It was fairly comfortable ride after couple of wearing days behind us. Once in Barcelona we set out to find tourist information point. They fortunately had McDonalds maps as well, just like in Madrid. So finding wifi wasn't that difficult, just had to find a spot to charge the phone as well. Once we got that, back to hostelbookers we went. It was our main site for finding hostels over the trip. Took a hostel that was located bit outside of the main area of Barcelona, but it was cheaper because of that and it gave us a chance to sleep in a bed for a change and take a nice shower.

The hostel did have its shortcomings, so our second night ing Barcelona was spent in the airport. Also we dropped our bags off in the airport early in the morning, so we had a whole day to discover Barcelona, without having to carry around our big backpacks.

The city of Barcelona was just as great as expected. There were long beautiful beaches to relax on and mesmerizing palm tree avenues. On our way back from the beaches we also took a look at the Sagrada Familia church, which was fairly interesting to see, with its unique architecture and high focus on small details.