Planning the Trip

On October 18, a little over two months before our actual departure, I booked a guided tour of the Sagrada Família for the last day of the year. From past travel experience, it has become clear that major attractions simply need to be booked in advance. Otherwise, you end up standing in front of them, looking at long lines and regretting that you didn’t think to buy tickets earlier.

When we first started organizing our family trips, we always had the same question:

What if we can’t go on the trip because someone gets sick and the tickets go to waste?

We found a solution by insuring our flights, attraction tickets, and public transport passes with Triglav Insurance. This time, the premium was less than 5% of the total ticket value. That way, at least part of the stress goes away.

The main sights are obvious, but for anything beyond that, I visit the library and borrow guidebooks. I usually choose the Eyewitness Travel series, which I like for its clarity and its suggested routes. Especially for us, since we do a lot of walking and truly believe that you see and experience the most when you explore a place on foot.

One small, slightly out-of-place note: apparently Santa Claus also knew where we were going.

Between Google Maps and ChatGPT

Once I’ve written out the places we want to visit from the guidebook, I start putting together a logical day-by-day route so we’re not zigzagging all over the place for no reason.

Over the past few trips, I’ve also started using ChatGPT, mainly because it can give you a rough travel plan in seconds, which you can then comfortably use as a starting point.

When it comes to navigation, opening hours, ticket availability for attractions, and finding kid-friendly restaurants, it’s still a bit lacking, so it’s better to double-check those elsewhere.

But yes, as a baseline, it’s very useful.

The final result is a compact printed booklet with the daily plan, and at the end I always include printouts of all our tickets and reservations. You never know what might happen to your phone.

Once, right in the middle of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, my phone fell onto the stone pavement in the old town and shattered. That was the end of technology for that trip.

What you can’t really plan for is something like this: a few days before departure, my eye got inflamed and there was nothing else to do but go to the urgent care clinic for antibiotic drops.

Still, it all feels a bit easier when a message like this is waiting for you in your airline’s app.

D-Day

Because our flight was in the afternoon, we had a relaxed morning and finished packing at an easy pace. We left for the airport a bit earlier than usual, since we hadn’t flown with this airline before.

Even though this is our 29th flight together as a family, that same feeling of excitement and anticipation still sweeps over us as if it were the first time.

There’s one question you always end up facing, whether you want to or not, before you check in:

Will they seat us together even if I didn’t reserve and pay for specific seats?

On one of our previous trips with connecting flights, reserving seats for the four of us would have cost almost as much as a round-trip ticket for one person. So I called the airline and said that surely they couldn’t seat a minor separately from a parent. The man on the other end agreed.

Since then, I haven’t paid for seat reservations. Over the next 16 flights, we always ended up sitting together, either three plus one, or two and two in the same row.

It was the same this time, except on the return flight, when Anja and Nara were seated up front and the two of us with Nia were toward the back of the plane. Which really wasn’t the end of the world. and even that only happened because the two seats in the same row were actually broken.

We have a flight to Rome planned in February with Ryanair, and for the May Day holidays to Edinburgh with easyJet. We’ll see how it goes there. In general, with the Star Alliance group (Swiss, Lufthansa, Air Baltic, Edelweiss …) and Vueling, they reliably seat you together.

Vueling

It’s a Spanish low-cost airline that launched a new Brnik–Barcelona route in November 2025. The fares were reasonable, and the departure times were civilized too, 3:35 PM from Ljubljana and 1:10 PM from Barcelona.

The only slightly annoying thing was that check-in through the app wasn’t possible, not even 24 hours in advance. It could only be done at the airport, when dropping off checked baggage. Carry-on luggage is limited to 40 × 30 × 20 cm, but no one really made a fuss if a bag was a centimeter or two over.

The flight takes about two hours, and the most beautiful moment was right at the beginning, when we climbed above the clouds over Brnik and they, lit by the afternoon sun, filled the entire view through the plane window.

There was no turbulence this time, the flight went by in no time, and before we knew it we were already descending toward the Catalan capital, just as the sun was setting.

Landing at El Prat and Barcelona

We landed in 12°C weather, and our Welcome Pickups driver was already on his way. Unlike the driver on our Portugal trip, this one didn’t give us much of an introduction to the city. In fact, he was mostly quiet during the ride and only became more talkative when I mentioned that we might take a taxi again when we leave.

oday, Barcelona is home to around 1.6 million people and serves as the capital of Catalonia, a region shaped by a long tradition of autonomy, its own language (Catalan, not just a dialect of Spanish but a distinct language), and its own flag, the Senyera.

In the Middle Ages, it was the center of the Crown of Aragon and had its own rulers, until political power gradually shifted to Madrid.

It was in Barcelona that Christopher Columbus was received when he returned from his first voyage to the Americas.

The city’s most distinctive mark was left by architect Antoni Gaudí, whose work made Barcelona recognizable around the world. The peak of his life’s work is the Sagrada Família, which is already the tallest church in the world and is expected to be completed in 2033, on the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’s death.

Apartment below Montjuïc

When we bought our plane tickets, I started looking into where in Barcelona it would make the most sense to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The options were the main promenade La Rambla, the Barceloneta beach, or Plaça Espanya.

La Rambla is crowded pretty much all the time, so that was the first option to go. Especially because we didn’t want to start every day in a river of tourists.

Celebrating on the beach, from what I read, is more relaxed and mostly aimed at younger people. So that was the second option off the list.

That made the decision almost by itself. I booked an aparthotel near Plaça Espanya, below the Montjuïc hill.

The apartment was fine, just the right size, with a small kitchenette and a ground-floor terrace.

Below Montjuïc, next to the famous Magic Fountain, lies Plaça Espanya, and this is where the city’s main New Year’s Eve fireworks take place, drawing more than 100,000 people. The plan was to climb up the hill on December 31 and watch the drone show and fireworks from above, safely away from the crowds down in the square.

It felt sensible, safe, almost ideal for spending the longest night of the year with family in a city like Barcelona.

In the end, that famous climb never happened. We welcomed the new year down on Plaça Espanya, right in the middle of an endless crowd.

First Walk and First Impressions

After unpacking, we went out for a short walk to get a feel for the neighborhood. A grocery store and a bakery were just around the corner, the main road was wide and nicely lit, and it led straight toward Plaça Espanya, less than a kilometer away.

Every now and then, as you walk by, a whiff of weed drifts past your nose, but we’re already used to that from previous trips. There was quite a bit of it in Washington, New York, and Tenerife in particular. We had already explained to the girls what it was about, so it wasn’t an issue.

Otherwise, the area felt safe, and whenever we asked someone something, they tried to help. English was a bit limited at times, but we always managed to understand each other in the end.

The Biggest Stress of Family Travel = Choosing Restaurants

Chicken nuggets, pizza, spaghetti Bolognese, and burgers make up the culinary repertoire of our trips.

After all these journeys, we still haven’t discovered a reliable formula for finding restaurants that offer something a bit more diverse, yet still acceptable to kids.

We’ve tried TripAdvisor, Yelp, and The Fork, Chrome searches, and just about everything else, mostly without much success.

To be fair, every now and then we do manage to find a place that works for everyone, and then… well, then you’re flooded with that feeling of total victory.

But today was not that day. Today, we went for pizza.

A Strange Smell in the Bathroom and Going to the Front Desk in My Pajamas

As we came back to our apartment through the decorated streets and started getting ready for our first night in the Catalan capital, a smell began coming from the bathroom, like something was burning. The smell stayed even when I turned on the ventilation, in fact it got even stronger.

There was nothing else to do but go down to the front desk. I went in my pajamas, because who’s at the front desk at ten in the evening anyway? Of course, that was exactly when it was full of people waiting to check in, and of course I got a few horrified looks.

Which I understand. A guy in pajamas with Christmas reindeer in the middle of the lobby explaining something about a burning smell.

Note to self: next time, put on sweatpants.

In the end, they promised that someone would come and take a look in the morning.

And together with the reindeer, I left the hotel lobby…

What will tomorrow bring?

A long day is waiting for us.

We’ll start by walking up Montjuïc and looking for a place where we’ll welcome the year 2026, then we’ll head back down into the city, hop on the metro to La Rambla, see a full-scale replica of a Spanish galleon, explore the Boqueria market, and end the evening with a light show in a church, similar to the one that impressed us so much in Porto.