Defying Death on the Streets of Barcelona

A final component of my birthday gift from Mom and Dad was a scooter (moped) tour of Barcelona. Now, I had never been on a moped, but figured it couldn’t be THAT hard. Boy, was I wrong. First, though, here’s a picture of us towards the end of the three hour tour, once we’d gotten the hang of things (more or less):

But before we got to that point, we had to learn how to ride a moped. Our first clue that this was maybe going to be harder than we anticipated was the reaction of the people at the scooter tour store when they found out that neither we, nor the Canadian lady who was also on the tour, had ridden mopeds before. They did not seem happy.

Fortunately, the tour guide was a very nice (and very patient) guy who gave us a 5 minute lesson. After kinda-sorta figuring out how to control the amount of oomph to give the gas handle, we took off. Into traffic. With other mopeds (apparently everyone in Barcelona rides mopeds) whizzing and weaving in and out of traffic around us as we valiantly tried to stay upright and not run into anything. Slightly terrifying, but one we got going it wasn’t bad.

First we headed up to the Sagrada Familia, where we stopped for a bit and walked around the outside of the cathedral. Then, after getting back on the bikes and surviving a rather dramatic curb-jumping incident (not me), we continued on to Parc Guell. Apparently Gaudi (of Sagrada Familia fame), was commissioned to design and build the park to attract rich people to that part of town. It’s pretty fancy and very full of tourists.

Another vantage point in the park:

Part of the park was set up as a laundry area, where the rich people’s clothes would theoretically be washed (we assume not actually by the rich people themselves).

Some of the columns in the laundry area was designed to look like clothes being wrung out:

After the park, it was back on the mopeds for a trip up to Parc Montjuic (where we had been the day before, but it was actually a great place to ride mopeds – wide, windy roads and very little traffic for us to hit. Here’s a view of Mt. Tibidabo (My only connection with Mt. Tibidabo is that Friends episode with the story you tell when you want to have sex.) But moving on. You can also see Placa de Espanya from this vantage point.

The way back to the scooter place was during rush hour, which provided more excitement (and more than a few horns blaring in our general direction). But we made it! And overall, it was fun! I think for the next moped trip I’ll try something with a little less rush hour traffic – like Tuscany.