16 day London/Barcelona itinerary suggestions - family of 4 with teens

Take a couple of nights from London and Barcelona and fast train to Madrid with day trip to Toledo. Fly home from Madrid.

Our flights are booked, so we can't change that. And our time in London is also worked out with day trips, so we want to keep our home base in London through 6/6 AM. We thought about London to Madrid or Paris, but we really don't want another big city...

As you rule out large cities following comes into my mind:

Narbonne and/or Carcassonne in Southern France (It’s about 30 min train ride between these cities)?
Ryanair has direct flights from London to Carcassonne. Direct train from Narbonne to Barcelona takes about 2 hours only.

Granada, Andalusia, Spain, Direct flights from London and to Barcelona (train would take 7 hours or more).

Girona! It is large and lively enough to make a great base, yet the historic center of town feels intimate. It has a walled medieval core, two interesting churches, a small art museum and a Jewish museum. It doesn't have the canals of Bruges, but there's a small river. It's a relatively quick train ride (as short as 38 minutes) from Barcelona. And two of the side trips you are considering from Barcelona (Besalu and Cadaques) are closer to and quicker from Girona. It makes a lot of sense to spend a few nights in Girona, taking advantage of its proximity to those other places you're interested in. The Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres is fun, too; the rest of that city isn't very interesting, by the standards of Spain.

Toledo is a great city with more sights than Girona, but that area around Madrid is full of fabulous, worthy towns (Salamanca, Segovia, Cuenca, Alcala de Henares as a start), so it's worth a trip of its own.

I really hate flying in the middle of a trip, so I'd resist any urge to go somewhere that would require a flight from London and a second flight on to Barcelona.

I'd take the Eurostar to Paris--under three hours. At least spend a couple of days there since you have so many days in Europe..

Then take the fast train to Barcelona--6.5 hours. Just outside of Paris we saw 185 mph.

Ok, since you don't want to visit a large city, how about taking the train to northern France? Maybe visit the west coast like Normandy/Brittany? Your boys may love the military history there. It's a fascinating area. You'd have to train to Paris and fly to Barcelona, though.

1) Post on the Spain forum a request to help define a blend of big city Barcelona experiences with surrounding small city/villages opportunities.
2) I hope you are renting apartments for having a kitchen to start the day with breakfast and having food on hand for the boys is a huge benefit. Plus the additional room to spread out and even have some privacy.
3) Barcelona public transport is superb with coverage and well connected between subway and trains. Hence your ability to move about for day trips is efficient.
4) Montserrat is an excellent day trip
5) Take half a day to spend at a Barcelona beach so the family can relax and swim in the Med
6) What roles have been assigned to the boys to invest in the research? I am the father of daughters and we learned the benefit of having the girls invested in the research "Or Else!" Mom and Dad will pick all the destinations. Barcelona was their first experience in Europe and they did great with selection of choices we may not have considered.

Strong second to Acraven's suggestion!

Ryanair has a couple of flights a day from London-Stanstead right to Girona.

Like Steven, I suggest you start by asking your two sons, instead of us. What do they want to do? They are not too young to be involved. And my guess is that the entire family will have a better time if they are involved in planning the itinerary.

Go to the beach? Go to museums? Perhaps a museum that they would prefer to the ones you would prefer - or a bit of each. For example, you might like the British Museum and they might think that is boring. They might want the Imperial War Museum or the Churchill Rooms.

In - or near - Barcelona, you might want a day trip to Montserrat, while they would rather go to the beach near Figueres with a stop at the Dali museum. (The Picasso Museum in Barcelona is absolutely fantastic, but when we were there with our 16 year old son in the late 1990s, we probably talked about the final room ... Picasso's art at around age 90 that was more X-rated and certainly not PG! I know our son asked us what happened in 1968, when he saw a Joan Miro abstract piece titled "1968" at the Fundacio Joan Miro, also in Barcelona.)

Send the boys to Rick Steves' website or Frommer's or Fodor's or Trip Advisor for London, Barcelona, England and Spain itinerary suggestions. Then, have a conversation with THEM about how to capture a variety of interests that will please your family ... with or without compromises on all sides.

Look for a couple of experiences. Maybe that is punting in Cambridge, going to a play in London or Stratford, or hiking in the Pyrenees. Looking for graffiti in London? Cycling somewhere?

If you were "visiting" the SF Bay area for a week, what would they choose? Golden Gate Park and the DeYoung ... or the Academy of Sciences? A day trip to Carmel? or surfing at Half Moon Bay? or hiking in the redwoods? North Beach, or Chinatown, or both?

One last observation, you have 6 full days for London and 7 full days for Barcelona. Do your sons speak any Spanish? If not, and assuming you keep this as a two country trip, perhaps you might add one day to London/England and subtract one day from Barcelona/Spain. 7 for London and 6 for Barcelona.