My phone didn't work. That made it harder to cope with the second hiccup - a strike by the Barcelona taxi drivers. As you'll see, we managed things quite well and had NO further problems during our entire trip. But landing with jet lag made things a bit harder than they would have been otherwise.
AT&T had made a mistake when I was getting everything setup for international travel. They had disabled international service on my phone. Martha's was working fine, and that made it easier to get customer service to fix mine. We took care of that when we got to our hotel.
But ... getting to our hotel was more of an adventure than we had expected. Normally, I just grab a taxi at the BCN airport and go to my hotel. But the taxi drivers were on strike to protest against the new services (similar to Lyft and Uber) that were invading their territory. As in many other places, taxi drivers don't think that these services should be allowed to operate without paying the high license fees required of the taxi drivers.
Fortunately, the BCN Metro service has been extended out to the airport. Unfortunately, the first ticket vending machine we tried required that we use the PIN on our credit card. Neither of us know it! The machine wouldn't accept our debit cards, as they don't have security chips. Fortunately, I keep euros in my wallet. So we paid cash, received very clear directions from a Metro employee and had a nice ride to the neighborhood of our hotel.
After a short walk, we were there. Our room wasn't available, but we were able to store our luggage and find a cash machine that did accept our debit cards. In fact, we never had another problem using our cards or getting cash during the entire remainder of our trip.
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