View from the Pillion - BMW R1200 RT

At IMT Bikes we are welcomed by Miguel who has been expecting us. The shiny BMW R1200RT is ready and waiting. It’s a handsome dark blue colour. Miguel is very thorough in showing Peter all of the features and necessary information about the bike. He also loans us a good mount for our GPS and gives us tips on things like parking and tolls. The paper work is signed and the ride begins – well almost. It takes the GPS a while to recognize that we're no longer in Canada – so we wait with traffic swirling around us for it to locate us near the Sants Train Station in Barcelona. Peter gets the feel of the bike as we set off in the busy evening traffic. It’s heavier and with less power than his Kawasaki Ninja 1000 back home.

Close to the hotel the streets are blocked off with several police vehicles and it takes some tricky navigating to work around that. There are several loud bangs that sound suspiciously like gun shots, but no one is running away or panicking. We never find out what the commotion was about. Right outside the side entrance to the hotel we join a line up of motorcycles parked on the sidewalk. This is technically illegal, but the cops turn a blind eye as long as the bikes don’t block anything significant. We take the bags to the room ready to start sorting and packing. We each have a side bag for our clothes; the warm layers for our pants and jackets, rain gear and a whole pile of electronic stuff will go into the top box. I view my bag with misgivings. How will I manage for eight days with only this little thing to hold everything? I am carefully selective and discard a few items out of necessity. These go back into our suitcases that we will leave in the hotel baggage room.

Taking advantage of having wheels, we head out to a different neighbourhood for dinner. Cal Pip is a restaurant highly recommended to us by a colleague who lives in Barcelona, but when we get there we find a line up stretching well out into the street. In typical impatient North American fashion we move on to find something where we won’t have such a long wait. We are rewarded by our random restaurant choice where the servers are enthusiastic, even if they can’t explain the menu to us in English. We order somewhat blindly and end up with a delicious variety of tapas and combination plates of veal, beef and scallops washed down by a good bottle of cava. It’s not customary to tip in restaurants in Spain, a custom we are still not comfortable with. But today we leave a token gratuity because of the good service.