March 28, 2010. One year later.

March 28th, 2010 was a pretty special day for The Shepherds. Once we arrived in Barcelona, we decided to take a ride up to Montserrat. Montserrat is actually the name of the mountain but what it is known for is Santa Maria de Montserrat, which is a Benedictine abbey located in the mountain in Catalonia, Spain. This is the monastery where people come to worship “La Moreneta,” or what we know as the “Black Madonna.”

(This was a little boy in our tour group picking up a Palm to take into the service.  We thought he was cute.)

This was so special to us not only because 3/28 was Palm Sunday and we were headed to a Benedictine monastery, but this was our very first church service together as a married couple.  We were fortunate enough to actually get inside the basilica (as you can imagine, there were thousands trying to do the same thing) to hear the Palm Sunday service.  The entire service was spoken in Latin so we have no idea what they were saying but just to be in the presence of the monks was incredible.

Because we spent so much time in the service, we weren’t able to see much more of the village.  But nonetheless, it was very meaningful to us both.
(We did get a picture of "Shepherd's Chapel" though which we thought was pretty cool.)

After Montserrat, we headed back to Barcelona and walked around the city for a few hours.  We went back to Las Ramblas, where you're guaranteed to see plenty of interesting things :)

We boarded our ship late that afternoon and the ship had an entirely new group of passengers.  Although this was the same ship we'd been on for the last 12 days, most of these guests were just boarding to only go on the 9-day leg of the cruise.  And most of these new guests were American.  The non-American guests referred to all of the Americans as "loud."  David and I wanted to pretend to be European because yes, those Americans were loud ;)

To get away from the madness of everyone boarding the ship, we went out to one of the side decks late that night and got a great picture of the moon over the Mediterranean Sea.

Next stop...Rome!