My wife and I took our first transatlantic cruise on the Navigator of the Seas (Royal Caribbean Cruise Line) from Barcelona to Tampa in November 2008. We arrived on a Sunday morning in Barcelona around 11 AM after traveling from Seattle (left around 11 PM, PST) to Paris. In Paris, we had to change planes at Charles De Gaulle Airport with a 45-minute window between arrival and departure. We literally had to run to another terminal while still going through the security process. At the airport in Barcelona, I looked around for Customs and Immigration. I saw nothing that looked like an official place. However, I spotted two uniformed officers standing in a kiosk. We went over to them to ask about Customs. One was on the phone, the other was listening to the conversation. They paid no attention to my pleas for assistance. We saw a big doorway adjacent to them and walked through it hoping to find Customs/Immigration ourselves.
Instead, we found ourselves outside the terminal. We saw many guides holding placards with names. One of them had our names on it. The guide was our ride to our hotel; we left with her without ever going through Customs/Immigration anywhere in Europe.
The hotel's dining room did not open for lunch until 3 PM. It was Spain after all! We were very hungry, having only had an airline meal in the last 18 hours or so. I asked about dining options and was handed a map with nearby restaurants highlighted. We chose Hard Rock Cafe since it was close and we knew we could find food there that we knew. We had lots of sightseeing planned for that afternoon and the next morning featuring the architecture of Gauda.
On the way back to the hotel, a bird pooped on my head and shoulder. It was an awful feeling, very large, very wet and very messy. A man popped out of the building next to us and offered to help me clean up. We were no more than 100 feet from our hotel. Tired as I was at the time, I accepted. Next thing I knew he was gone with our passports, half our cash and traveler's checks and my credit card. Fortunately, we had color copies of our passports separately stashed and my wife had her credit card, half the cash and traveler’s checks. We spent three hours in a Barcelona police station filing a report, which was printed out for us (in Spanish, of course). Now we had no time to “see” Barcelona. I vowed that if that was the way travel to foreign countries was going to be, then no more travel beyond our borders for us.
Our cruise was leaving the next afternoon, Monday at 4 PM. Before we left the hotel early Monday morning to go get new passports, we placed our suitcases in the hallway outside our room per instructions from the cruise line and hotel. Would we ever see them again?
When we arrived at the U.S. Consulate, it looked like a fortress with walls, fences and armed guards. At 9 AM, we were second in line and were told we would have our new passports by 11 AM. I thought, “2 PM was more realistic and that would be okay since our cruise was at 4 PM”. We were done by 11! I took back all my bad thoughts about the U.S. State Department.
We arrived at our ship at 11:30 at the same time as the bus from the hotel arrived with our suitcases. We boarded quickly and had no other problems.
Travel hint: when traveling watch out for scams; they are many and varied. You can look them up on a computer or smart phone.