Barcelona Friday: Packing and Preparing

Last night I did my packing for going to Barcelona tomorrow. We're flying with Monarch (I refuse to fly Ryanair) and we can only take hand luggage, unless we pay extra for hold luggage of course.

We fly in the morning, and will have to get up at stupid o'clock. Therefore I've bought some snacks for the journey.

The 9 Bars were 2 for £1 at ASDA and they've replaced the honey in their peanut bars with golden syrup meaning that there are now two vegan options. I'll probably have one on the way there and the other on the way home. The nakd bars were 60p, again at ASDA which is pretty cheap. The dairy free buttons I got from Alternative Stores to top up an order so I could meet the minimum spend amount.  I got some cute strawberry fruit hearts from Home Bargains, which are marked vegetarian and from the ingredients they look vegan too. To make this a bit healthier, I'll be cutting up some carrots into batons to take with me nearer the time.

The Boy insists on getting factor 50 sunscreen whenever we go away, and it can be difficult to find a sunscreen past factor 30 that is vegan.  However it was Superdrug to the rescue again, when I found this spray that was vegan- although I had to peel the security stickers off various bottles because some bright spark had stuck them right over the section that tells you if they are vegan!

We bought two bottles for when we went to Costa Blanca in July and it's lovely, not at all sticky and smells quite nice. In fact, everyone kept stealing it rather than using their own.

Obviously, this is too big to take in hand baggage so I got a little spray bottle from Superdrug and poured some in there, we're only there for four days so that should be enough.

Preparation

I learnt from my last trip to Costa Blanca that you can't just leave things to chance when your a vegan, so this time I was prepared.

To be fair, Barcelona is much more vegan friendly and if you look on Happy Cow you'll see there is plenty of choice and the challenge is narrowing it down!

The two blogs I used to help me narrow down the choices were Vegan in Brighton and Keepin' it Kind.

Once I'd narrowed down my choices I used Google maps to create some bespoke maps- one of the places I want to visit, which are clumped together in the centre and the other of the location of our hotel. As I have a gmail account and can save them under my places and print out a marked up map. I then used Happy Cow to make notes of the opening times of each place where possible.

Hopefully the bit of extra preparation will make this trip a lot smoother than the last one!