Barcelona and Beyond

Well it's 12:42 a.m. here in Font-Romeu and despite how ridiculously hard today's training was I cannot sleep... Cruddy insomnia. Just kidding... But seriously, this isn't the first time this has happened this camp. I've had a number of nights where I can barely sleep a wink. Lucky for you, I will sit here and write a blog post while chilling to the soothing melodies of the xx.

On the bright side, I'm slowly catching back up to the rest of the group. Leading into the camp I was a little behind on on-ice volume but I'm starting to feel a lot more comfortable and smooth. Every day is a challenge but it is very rewarding.

For "recovery" last weekend (not this past weekend but the one before) we went down to Barcelona. Ha...

I don't think much of us got much recovery, apart from a very good sleep down at sea level we did a ton of walking and sitting in the sun. Both of which are very draining, especially considering we were not used to either of those activities up in Font-Romeu!

Olivier Jean had already been to Barcelona a couple times and because we were only going to be there less than 24 hours total, he mapped out an awesome root for us to maximize our time there.

As soon as we touched ground we broke up into small groups and toured. First we (Frank, Alex, Guillaume, Francois-Louis and I) hit a bunch of Gaudi architecture, here are two pictures of some of the structures we saw below.

The world famous Sagrada Familia, under construction...

And Casa Mila.

Afterwards we took a long walk down one of Barcelona's more famous touristy streets, La Rambla. It wasn't particularly interesting beyond it being very busy so we veered off pretty quickly down a side street in search for a place to get some food. We found a decent place for some beer and tapas.

The random side street, believe it or not significantly less busy than La Rambla.

A little more walking and we found ourselves at the beach, where all the team managed to reunite.

Voila, the Mediterranean!

Ok, I think I'm finally getting tired so I will stop now. I will leave you with a cool picture of a random street when we got lost getting back to our hotel that night. I will try and get more in soon!

Enjoy!