Episode 8: Gavin 1-3 Barcelona, an ever more complex scoring system, and why late trains are a good thing

So this morning I had prepared for everything that could possibly go wrong today, because usually if it can, it does, I had on 3 layers, 2 of which quickly found themselves in my bag as soon as I got on the bus to L’Aldea. So I get to the station and buy my ticket to Sants, 11,25€, the cheapest available, good start, so I wait for the train, get on it, and travel to Barcelona, get there, and decide to walk to the meeting to save money on the Metro, and buy my ticket back straightaway to save any mishaps causing me to miss my train back. And now for Google Maps to come into play and screw me over, with roundabouts and first lefts and what have you, when I thought I was going the right way I went and spent my last note on a (bloody huge) sandwich and bottle of water, hoping to kill time before the meeting which would later turn out to be a mistake. Then the fun part started; I thought I was to take the road I was on straight to the Departament d’Ensenyament, nice, clean and simple, until it abruptly ended at a T-junction, I hedged my bets going one way and luckily enough saw two police officers, so I asked them where Via Augusta was, and they mentioned Avinguda Diagonal, now the problem here is that I thought I was already on Diagonal before turning onto the road that I thought went to the building. But I took their instructions and eventually found myself somewhere familiar, Carrer del Bruc, only Carrer del Bruc is actually the place where the CTA is where I went to (try to) register as a referee, so no wonder it was bloody familiar! So now I was totally winging it, I went over to the Metro stop across the road and deciphered from the map there where to go, then found myself at Provença, hang on, didn’t I come through here for the other meeting when I bought the wrong ticket? How big really is Barcelona? Oh well, outwards, upwards, and inlandwards, as I knew that Provença is on the same line as Muntaner, the stop closest to the Departament, so just head in that general direction and I’ll find it, oh look, there’s 15 minutes until the meeting, what was that about killing time? After a few more twists and turns I saw Muntaner and eventually the building, arriving at 3PM on the dot, time management at its finest. So we had the meeting which actually proved a lot more useful than the other ‘meeting’ last week, and it finished at half 5, next challenge: either get to Sants on foot in time for the train that leaves Barcelona-França at 17:48, or have to wait another 90 minutes for the next one.

Given that I now knew where I was going it was a lot easier, I walked down to Diagonal with Dan who lives in Vinaròs and was getting the bus straight from Barcelona, that goes through Amposta, but it was marginally more expensive and I already had my train ticket anyway, get to Diagonal and I had 5 minutes before my train left França, and I could only assume it’d leave Sants 3 or 4 minutes later, so now down the road from the roundabout where I should have turned off to go to Diagonal, but don’t really know how I managed any different, even trying to retrace my steps on Google Earth right now I just simply cannot figure it out, but anyway it got to 17:48 and I could just see the top of Torre Catalunya, the hotel across from Sants, and decided to start running, in my jeans, after having done deadlifts yesterday, let’s just say my hamstrings don’t really like me right now. Then me and some other guy ended up basically rugby tackling each other, you know that awkward as hell moment when you and someone else are walking opposite ways and you go one way, they go the same way, you go the other way, they do, one of you goes the other way, and you eventually get past each other, well we were both running in opposite directions with very little time to actually get past each other as opposed to through each other, especially with 6 lanes of traffic coming at us, hurt a fair bit, but anyway, I ran into the station, got through the barrier (as opposed to queuing up, buying my ticket and then getting through the barrier :D) and looked on the departure board, “oh crap, it’s not there, it’s not there, it’s THERE! IT’S LATE! YES!!” Literally could not believe my luck, waited for the train, got on, sat down, and went to sleep, waking only near L’Ampolla to think “hang on a minute, it’s gonna be past 8 when I get to L’Aldea, will there actually be any buses?” Fortunately after a few texts to Kerry I found out there would be at 8:25, again raising doubts about getting to the stop on time, fantastic, but as it happened I got to the stop with about 5 minutes to spare, plus it was late anyway.

So I got home, had some tea, and opened my laptop to blog about today, and check Facebook, and see a certain update along the lines of “I’ve been paid”. Interesting, so if I were to, say, go to my online banking and have a look at my balance…

Yeah, they know their memes out here.