Barcelona Spain

80 days to departure from Sweden and one last big European vacation trip is done. Barcelona Spain was a wonderful choice to spend an entire week in one place. There's still stuff there I haven't seen after trying to hit the major tourist spots. It was a cheap 3 hour flight on Vueling Airlines. Sometimes the Swedish airlines are cheapest and sometimes it's best to take whatever budget airline they have at the destination.

There's way too many photos from a week to put in a post so I'll try to pick just a few of the best and keep this post relatively short. Lots of tapas had to be eaten and lots of art and artistic architecture had to be seen. This is another city where the hop-on-hop-off buses give you a good method to get around to interesting places outside the main city area. The Gothic Quarter near Las Ramblas was a good place to be in the middle of it all with hotels, restaurants, and plenty of walking streets.

Gran Canaria

We're taking full advantage of opportunities to take vacations. I had leave from my previous job and saved more during 5 months of mandatory training. We've taken short weekend trips so it may look like we're on vacation a lot, but this was only our second full week of vacation since Dec 2013. My office has another IMS which gives me the luxury of taking time off as long as he's working. I may be the only one in the office at a future smaller post so I'm taking advantage of this while I can.

We headed south to the Grand Canaries to escape the Swedish winter and soak up some sun. The Schengen Area lets us travel around participating EU countries without international border control. It was as easy as flying around the US when we flew 6 hours to a Spanish island off the coast of Africa. I thought this might be the southernmost Schengen Area destination but Wikipedia lists EU's southernmost point as the French island of Réunion near Madagascar. This job definitely gets me looking more closely at world geography in a hands-on way.