Valencia

Dad and I spent a night in Valencia - there wasn’t a ton of destinations there, but it made sense as a stop between Madrid and Barcelona, and there was certainly enough to fill up a day. The coolest thing was the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciènces, which was a super modern and enormous campus of sorts with science and art museums, theaters, and more stuff we didn’t even see. We didn’t really go in anywhere but the buildings and campus were just incredible. We also had a great seafood paella on the beach at night. The beach area was very nice at night, a ton of people were out and there was a very long strip of restaurants. There was also a strip of clubs along a pier going out on the water so it was a super cool place to be at night.
While these things were fun, we seemed to run into every bump in the road possible in Valencia. We changed our plans last minute to come here - we were originally going to Seville, but they are currently having a historic heat wave with 110° weather, so we changed plans to go to Valencia instead. We couldn’t find a hotel in the city so we stayed in a nearby town, but getting a cab on either end was incredibly difficult and frustrating. We also had major confusion with using the metro - we bought tickets using a machine, which dispensed paper tickets, but when we got to our destination you needed to tap a card to open the gates to leave, which we did not have. We asked the security guy for help but he basically said we were screwed. We obviously couldn’t stay in the station forever so we just found an unattended exit and jumped the gate, which was a bit nerve wracking. We also could not get either of our credit cards to work to buy a train ticket to Barcelona so we had to go back to the train station in Valencia to get help from someone from the train company (which was a pain but ended up working).
Ultimately we still had fun in Valencia, but I am excited to get back to Barcelona, where I am more confident with the public transport and I know there are more attractions to visit!Read more