Hello Celebrity Solstice!

After a very good nights sleep (well needed!) we got up and repacked our stuff to get on the ship.  We then took a little walk around La Rambla, 

the market

and we even had some Dunkin Donuts (or, Dunkin Coffee, as its called here.)  The donuts were terrible, so it wasn't the best experiment ever......

Had a very nice walk, checked out some of the stores and looked at all the people wandering around.

Back to the hotel!  We checked out around noon, and had the front desk call us a cab to take us and our stuff to the port.   I managed to use my tiny tiny bit of spanish with the cab driver - there was another group leaving at the same time and the front desk had called for 2 cabs, so they had assumed we were all  together, but I let him know we only had "dos persones" and the other cab had "quatro persones" and we were good to go (I have no idea if I spelled my spanish correctly, but I got my point across!)

The trip to the port was hilarious (as it always seems to be for us!) and this one proved no different.  There were 6 (6!!!) cruise ships in port today, so traffic heading on the 1 road out to the port was a bit backed up.  But our cab driver took a little side street and we popped out just down from the traffic nightmare, and got to the ship fairly quickly.   We also found out that our cab driver has been married for 24 years, had 2 children and has always lived in Barcelona (all in espanol!) so that was entertaining.

Once we got to the ship, we spent the next hour standing in various lines - security, checkin and then the "turn your passport in so we can get the Egyptian visa" line.  While the lines themselves were not awesome, the peoplewatching was, and it meant by the time we got on board our room was ready.

And WOW!  What a room it is.  I will take some pictures in the next few days and post them.

We had some lunch, picked up a few drinks and then headed back to our room to unpack, since our luggage had arrived.  Then it was off to the muster drill, and our muster station was in the dining room, comfortably seated indoors.  AWESOME!  We got a great place to sit, right next to the exit so we could escape quickly when the drill was over.

We then when and hung out at the Martini Bar, and 2 of the bartenders from our last cruise in Dec are here, so we enjoyed chatting with them and made some new passenger friends as well.  We ended up hitting a wall about 8pm, and headed to bed without finishing dinner.  Long day over at last.....