Long time - no blog

Well, we've been travelling like mad to get across to Croatia in time to meet Steph, Michael and Jackie (their landlady!). Currently we are in Verona. We've had a lovely day but are heading to Bologna this evening as the hotels are expensive in Verona. The Arena has Aida on at the moment so prices are probably higher than normal.

Since the last blog we've been to:
- Granada
- Valencia
- Barcelona
- Nice
- Verona

That's a lot to tell you about in the 10 minutes or so of internet time I have left. Here goes though...

Granada was fantastic. It is the site of the Alhambra. A famous fortress. A lot of it is in excellent condition. We've taken quite a few photos to show you later. Granada was one of the places we really wanted to go to but for a while we didn't think we'd get there. We even got up super early to join the queues for the tickets available for the day (as all the pre-bookable ones were sold out well in advance). After a 6am wake-up in our Grenada hotel with the intent of being in the queue by 7am we couldn't find the place. We drove around in circles and didn't join the line until nearly 8am. We were concerned that we wouldn't get tickets or the only tickets would be available in the afternoon (they only let a certain number of people into the palace every half hour) and we really needed to get going. We'd hired a car but needed to return in within three days in Barcelona. Quite a bit of driving involved! In the end we got a ticket for 11:30am. That gave us a couple of hours to look around the rest of the place too. Brilliant, it was and well worth it.

Valencia was okay. Not especially exciting but pretty enough.

Barcelona was good. We've both been there before but it was good to get a better look at it. The tour bus was excellent. We got on and off that several times. Spent 4-5 hours touring the place seeing one of the parks, several churches (including Sagrada Familia) and Guell Park (with a lot of Gaudi's work).

I'm going to stop this blog now before I run out of time. I'll start a new one on our trip to France.