A Required Adventure

When you sign up for a six-week program, you are condensing the content from a regular class, which is 15 weeks, into a shorter version. In order to make every class worth three credit hours, we are required to participate in a variety of activities outside of our regular classes.

One of these activities is a three-day cultural experience trip. On this trip, we visited three different cities in Spain: Tarragona, Barcelona, and Peñíscola.

Everyone got up Monday, loaded the buses, and settled in for the almost four-hour trip to Tarragona. The city is only about 2 and a half hours from Valencia but we stopped for over an hour to take a break from riding.

The main attraction of the trip was Barcelona but our hotel was in Tarragona. I think this was the school’s way of lowering the liability of something bad happening. There is very little to do in Tarragona, especially compared to Barcelona’s nightlife.

While eating lunch, we asked what there was to do in the city and the waiter replied “Leave.”

We had a walking tour that afternoon so that took up a lot of our time. The guides showed us around the historic area of town. They also told us about the history of Tarragona and some general Spanish history. It was a really great tour, so I guess the waiter was wrong. There was something to do in the city!

We were tired from traveling all morning so my room chose dinner and bed as the plan for the night after the tour. We walked to a pizza place and it was like being transported back to the United States. It looked and smelled just like Cici’s pizza and the early 2000s music really solidified the vibe of the place.

Tuesday morning, we loaded the buses again and drove to Barcelona. It was an all-day walking tour and the heat was brutal. They split us into small groups so we could be true tourists and follow our guide’s flag around. We also had little headsets so we could hear our guide at all times.

We started up on a mountain that looked down at the shipping port. While up there we also saw hundreds of people lining up for the Harry Styles concert taking place on Wednesday.

Our tour guide told us all about Barcelona and the shipping port while we walked around on top of the mountain. We stopped for a little snack break before loading the buses and continuing the tour.

Thankfully we had time to cool down on the buses in between walking tours. Our next tour was through the Old Town. It’s so hard to imagine that most of these buildings have been here longer than the US has existed. Everything about this city is old and beautiful, I really wish we had more time to explore it.

After our lunch break, we went to the Sagrada Familia. This is the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world. Our tour guide told us that the church is built using fundraising. They will build for a while, then when funds run out they stop and raise more money. Money is raised through private donors and through sales of tickets to tour the church. Currently, it is expected to be finished around 2026.

Like many of the old buildings in Europe, there was no A/C. It made the tour a little sweaty and after spending the entire morning touring around the city, everyone was a little tired. The church itself was beautiful. It was filled with stained glass and intricate statues. It was just unbearably hot.

If you are ever looking to visit Spain, July might not be the best time temperature wise.

While walking around the church, I found out Daniel Ricciardo was rejoining the F1 grid. It's safe to say that I was sending a lot of texts and reading a lot of tweets after the news broke. I should have taken a photo to commemorate the moment because it is so on brand for me to be more concerned about racing than the 140-year-old building I’m standing in.

We reloaded the buses after the tour and traveled back to Tarragona. I didn’t get to see where Cheetah Girls 2 was filmed but Barcelona was still amazing. Guess I’ll just have to go back!

I grabbed a quick dinner when we got back so I could shower and go to bed. We weren’t leaving super early the next day but I wanted to sleep as much as possible after doing an all-day walking tour.

The trip back to Valencia might have been the best part of the whole trip. We stopped in a city named Peñíscola. We had the option to either tour on our own or go with a group to tour the castle. I chose the castle and I’m so glad I did. We were able to see the whole city and look out across the water.

After walking around the castle, we had free time to grab lunch. My group picked a restaurant that looked out over the water and it might have been the best meal I ate the entire time I was in Spain.

We ordered a bunch of things to share so we tried a lot of dishes. We had two different kinds of mussels, lots of shrimp, and calamari. The calamari was perfect and the mussels were amazing.

The best part of the meal might have been the location. It looked like we were in Greece and we got to look out across the Mediterranean water while enjoying our food.

We loved it so much that some of us debated taking a train back on a different day just to do it all again!

It was time to go back to the buses after we finished our amazing meal and I can say with some confidence that almost everyone was asleep on the ride back to Valencia.

It might have been a required trip but it was incredibly fun. I wouldn’t have done half the things we did if I had gone on my own. FSU Valencia changes the trip every semester so that every group gets a little bit different experience. I don’t know what the other trips are but this one is outstanding.