Just Bought My Passes

Phew!

Just bought my renfe passes today. I bought the passes for Valencia, and then to travel to Madrid.

I got all of them for really early in the morning. I hope that I am super disciplined and can get up early enough in the morning to make those trains. My train to Valencia leaves the Sants station at 7am. I checked the metro schedule for Barcelona, and it looks like they start running at 5am. They stop running at midnight. I will definitely need to take the metro to the Sants station because I am staying near Placa Catalyna, at the Itaca Hostel Barcelona. I chose this location  because it is close to the pick up for my Pyrenees tour.

If you look at a map, the Sants station is so far away form the center of Barcelona. The good thing about Barcelona is that it looks like there are an endless amount of Metro stations. And it looks like ticket are about 2 Euros each. Which is not too bad.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm staying at the Itaca Hostel. I hope they serve breakfast early enough for it to be worth choosing this hostel. They're location looks great however, and they have laundry facilities. They are right in the center of the Gothic Neighborhood.

I still have to buy my tourist bus pass... I'm still not sold on this idea though. I'm not sure that from 1pm on that I will have enough time to see everything, when the bus take 120 minutes to go through just one route. Plus, if I want to stop and see something, I would have to wait a while for the bus to come back through. Also, to be entirely realistic, I am not going to be able to see any museums. I would rather see cool buildings and markets though. I kind of want to shop while I'm there as well.

Renfe

Since I'm leaving Barcelona at 6am, I will get to Madrid by 9am. This is sufficient time to see the Prado (I hope, I think that its probably huge). I also want to just walk around and explore the streets. Again, maybe buy something cool or some type of souvenir. The big issue is that I will have to have my big backpack with me the whole time! Which will be awful. I want to see if they have any type of locker system in Madrid, like they have in Barcelona, like the Barcelona Lockers. Maybe they will have something like that near the airport. I will have to do further research. I have wanted to see El Escorial and Valle de los Caidos, but I really am not sure that I will be able to do this before I have to meet everyone from my group. The last person arrives at 3pm.