OOhhh Tibidabo

So as mentioned before, us guys had quite the day already by the time we got back to the hostel after the tour of the Olympic sites. However after we ate and rested, we still wanted to go up on top of this giant hill with a big church on it that was a little bit outside of Barcelona but you could still see it from where we were. I guess you might consider it a small mountain rather than a hill since the top was covered by clouds some of the times we looked up there. Since we had a daily metro pass already we were just going to take the metro to the base of the "hill" and then the funicular up to the top. A funicular is just a fancy name for the metro cars that go up a hill attached to a cable.

So we all grabbed our camera since there would be an awesome view of the city when we got to the top and we walked to the metro stop. We thought we knew where we were going but we didn't even know the name of the metro stop or the church's name so we looked at the metro map and decided on the stop we needed to get off at. We sat on the metro for quite some time and thought to ourselves that this ride was talking quite some time but we didn't think too much of it since we knew this place wasn't exactly in downtown Barcelona. Then we turned a corner and saw the hill we wanted to go to behind us and we were getting farther and farther away. Not so good. We then realized we had got on the commuter rail system train and we were now in a suburb of Barcelona so we quickly got off the train not knowing where we were.

Thankfully this station had a platform where you could get to the other side without exiting the station altogether so we didn't have to pay to get pack in since we were out of the range where our metro passes would work. There was an employee of the metro system at that station so we tried asking in Spanish/English where we needed to go in order to get to this church and they gave us directions on how to get there. SO we got back on a train which came about 5 minutes later and headed back the right direction. Really the day couldn't go more wrong if it tried. But it did very quickly. We followed the directions of the metro employees and transferred metro trains at the right stop and headed up to where the funiculars were. If we wanted the funicular which headed directly in front of the church we would have had to make a couple more transfers but according to the map, the funicular we were at now was about the same distance away as any other two metro stops which is probably only about 7-8 blocks or so. So we made the decision that we wouldn't mind walking those couple of blocks as long as we got up there because we wanted to make sure we left enough time to catch the metro back down since that would have been the only way down. There was nothing on the metro map which said map not to scale.

Us three guys loaded onto the funicular and headed up the hill. When we got to the top we noticed that we couldn't see the actual church who's name we learned was Tibidabo. But we used our "sense of direction" and walked up a flight of steps and at the top we could see the church. It wasn't exactly close but at least we could see it. We then started our walk towards the church taking roads we thought would take us to the right place. We then came upon a fork in the road, neither direction appeared to be going right to Tibidabo so we had quite the decision to make since we didn't want to walk too far down the wrong road. We obviously took the wrong fork and had to turn around when we got to the dead end which thankfully wasn't too far down. After we turned around we walked past a Spanish couple who were taking their dogs for a walk and Jesse stopped to ask them directions to Tibidabo. I don't know if they didn't like us because we were obviously tourists or if they really had no sense of distance. But the guy said that we had to go back to the fork in the road and obviously take the other road. He said that it wasn't a well lit road to be walking on since I guess most people don't go this way. This should have been our first hint that this wasn't normal. He also said that the walk was about one kilometer. So we decided we didn't care walking one kilometer at all so we started on our way.

Well we got to the fork and started down the right road which turned out to be a pitch black road which wound up the side of the mountain and had no shoulders and a guardrail on one side. And i forgot to mention that it also started to rain. We walked and walked and walked. There was no signs saying Tibidabo this many kilometers but all we knew was that guy's guess at 1 kilometer was about 5 kilometers or so too short. This road wound up the side of the mountain and we honestly thought we would never get there. By the time we got to the top, we were literally walking in the clouds which just pretty much dampened all of our clothes.

By some miracle of God we wound up in front of this church. It was obviously closed by the hour we got there and we were in the clouds so there was really no good picture to be taken of it so we took the pictures we could and decided we should head back down to the city so we could get changed and get ready to watch the Super Bowl. There was a man in an office up there that said customer service on the window which turned out to be very ironic. He was sitting there with his cigarette reading a magazine. We didn't know where the funicular was to go back down so we asked him. In his very annoyed voice he gave us the news we had coming to us all along,"The metro is closed up here now." All 3 of us guys looked at each other with stunned/terrified looks on our faces. So we told Jesse to go back and ask where the bus stop was. Even more annoyed now, this "customer service" representative said in an even more annoyed tone "The buses don't run now."

I don't know if anybody has ever gotten a feeling of being completely stranded but I got it at this moment. There was a road we walked on but we hadn't seen a car in probably an hour. We went over scenarios in our heads and we came up with 2. We would have to walk down this entire mountain and try to find a car/metro/taxi to get back to the city. We were miles and miles outside of the city. Our other option was to go back to this hotel we walked past about 45 minutes before which had porches and BMW's parked in the lot which meant it would cost a pretty penny for a room. All of us were absolutely terrified.

FINALLY while we were standing there a car drove up and the couple got out and took some pictures of the church. I said to Jesse that he had to go over and ask them immediately if they could please give us a ride down to Barcelona if it wasn't too much trouble. This was our only hope of pretty much avoiding exhaustion from walking down. Thankfully the guy spoke English and even more thankfully he said it would be no problem giving us a ride down. His name was Carlos and he was working in Barcelona but had just come back from a semester in Chicago. I have never felt more gracious to anybody before in my life. It took us almost a half an hour by car to get to a metro stop and we definitely would have missed some turns had we walked. On the way down he even stopped at this observation area and showed us some of the landmarks of the city. From this point we could see the FC Barcelona football stadium where a game was going on and the amazing thing was that we could actually hear the crowd. We finally got down to the metro stop and we all thanked him without end. We got back to the hostel with quite the story and it wasn't even 11:00 yet.

At the end of the night I got to ride in a European car which was cool, I got to see a church which now I think is quite overrated and too far away from Barcelona, I got to see a great view of Barcelona (given it was at night and in the rain), I got to walk several miles on quite a dangerous road, and I learned that maps are not drawn to scale. Lesson learned. All in all it was obviously something to remember and something that I will never ever do again.