Day 9 – Valencia – August 12th

No plans, no expectations, just being.  The goal of Valencia was to just be and observe, and that’s what we did.  

The boat arrived in Valencia over an hour late because someone on the boat spotted what appeared to be a vessel of some sort floating in the water as we left Gibraltar.  The ship had a responsibility to check it out, and it went quite a bit out of the way to see what it was.  It turned out to be the underside of a dead whale, thankfully.  Well, not thankfully because a beautiful creature had died, but we were thankful it wasn’t a capsized boat.  Because of our expedition, the captain tried to makeup time but because of the headwinds, we were late anyway.  And with the Royal Princess being a gigantic ship, there was just no way to make up the time which put us behind schedule.  

Once we docked everyone it seemed, over 3,000 people got off the boat all at once.  Shawn and I decided to hang back because we didn’t want to get caught in a mess of people trying to exit the boat.  Little did we know we’d get caught in one regardless of our efforts. 

There was one bus that brought people from the dock to the maritime station, and people were itching to get into town.  Regardless of any semblance of a line to get on the bus, the people from the ship did not follow directions and just rushed the bus as soon as it arrived.  We again decided to hang back and just watch, but it seemed like there was no other way.  So we kindly nudged our way onto the bus while trying to protect the older folks getting on.  Making sure we protected people as best we could from others pushing, we boarded the bus.

The maritime station also served as a tourist information spot.  We bought tickets to a hop-on/hop-off bus.  We wanted to hop off, but decided we wouldn’t have enough time to wait for another bus to come as each stop there was a decent wait, so we stayed on just listening to the information given about historical sights and the like.  It was interesting, but sitting for over an hour listening to a recording was a bit challenging.  

No harm, no fowl though.  We had no plans and ended up driving by and seeing some pretty cool stuff.  But I can’t bet the experience in Barcelona will be different.