Arrival in Barcelona and Excitement for the World’s Largest Cruise Ship

Off on our autumn holiday 🥳😎🚢 We are so excited… We have arrived in Barcelona, and tomorrow the world’s largest cruise ship awaits! 🚢😎 Our flight from Billund landed in Barcelona today at 1:50 p.m., actually ten minutes ahead of schedule. We quickly made our way out of the airport and ordered an Uber for the 17-kilometre journey to our hostel in Barcelona. The ride cost €29, about DKK 215. By comparison, a regular taxi would have cost around €45, or DKK 335. We are staying at TwentyTú Hi-Tech Hostel Barcelona, where we have a room with four bunk beds and our own bathroom and toilet. It is basic but clean and pleasant. Staying in Barcelona on a weekend is certainly not cheap, though. We have to pay no less than DKK 1,200 for a single night. 😅 We are staying in a more local part of Barcelona near Poblenou, away from the main tourist areas. There are plenty of small restaurants, cafés and shops here, and prices are generally lower than in the most visited parts of the city. It is actually a very nice neighbourhood where you get a better sense of everyday life in Barcelona. Even though we are not staying right in the old town, nothing is very far away. The beach is about a 20-minute walk from here, while the charming El Born district and the Gothic Quarter, with their many narrow streets and restaurants, are around half an hour away. It is 24°C in Barcelona with clear skies. That is rather different from Denmark, where it is around 12°C and rainy at this time of year. We therefore decided to spend the afternoon at the beach. Plenty of people were still enjoying the sunshine, and several were swimming in the Mediterranean. Not bad at all for 10 October. 😎☀️ Mette also had a massage from one of the many Chinese women who walk along the beach offering massages. Thirty minutes for around DKK 100 is very reasonable. Tomorrow we board the world’s largest cruise ship! 🚢 This evening we went out for dinner at a local restaurant, and naturally much of our conversation was about what awaits us tomorrow. We are boarding Royal Caribbean’s brand-new Legend of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship. The children in particular are very excited. 🥳 We have now been on almost 20 cruises around the world, so we have experienced quite a few different ships. But how large can this ship really be compared with those we have sailed on before? Considerably larger, as it turns out! 😅 Legend of the Seas is 365 metres long, has 20 decks and can carry up to 7,600 passengers plus around 2,350 crew members. That means almost 10,000 people can be aboard a single ship! 😳 By comparison, around Christmas last year we sailed on AIDAbella, which is 252 metres long and carries just over 2,000 passengers at normal occupancy. Legend is 113 metres longer, and in terms of gross tonnage it is about 3.6 times the size of AIDAbella. That is quite a difference. AIDAbella certainly did not feel like a small ship, so we are excited to discover just how enormous Legend really is. We will spend the next week cruising the Mediterranean, stopping in Mallorca, Marseille, La Spezia, Civitavecchia near Rome and Naples before returning to Barcelona next Sunday. Another cruise begins tomorrow, this time on a ship larger than anything we have ever experienced. It is going to be exciting! 🚢😎☀️