Reus

We made an unplanned detour to Reus, once the second-most wealthy city in Catalonia because of its textile trade.

When you are the wealthiest, most prominent couple in the second most wealthy and prominent city in Catalonia, and you give the most famous architect in Spain free reign to design and build you a house with a cheque blanco, this is what you get. Including, in 1905, running water, electricity, flush toilets, telephones and radiant floor heating.

Much like me, Spain has a little bit of an independent streak. And because of this, when it designed its national railway system it didn’t bother to check to see how wide the tracks were in the rest of Europe. As a result, all of Spain’s train tracks have a slightly different width than the tracks in the rest of the continent, whose countries were better at cooperating. Now that Spain sees the benefit of sharing with others, it is adding a third rail to countless miles of track so that both Spanish and non-Spanish trains can travel on them. Which is my roundabout way of saying that because of rail construction we couldn’t take a train back to Barcelona as originally planned. But happily, the national railway provided a free luxury bus to take us to the closest available station and we got a train from there to Barcelona.

And it’s Martha’s birthday so we got to do whatever she wanted, which unsurprisingly turned out to be going to a bar for dinner. And we didn’t have trouble getting a table because eating dinner at 8:30 means that we’re in and out a good hour before everyone else starts thinking about dinner.