We were traveling out of Barcelona when the #SpainBlackout hit. We were actually waiting in line for the train. Power went out and cell service cut around noon. I was able to get wifi from a nearby hotel (I hope room 123 doesn't mind). I found an outage map for the city, but the map was entirely down. I overheard someone say it was national and found an article about that, but there really wasn't any info yet.

After waiting for a while with no info, the train station was evacuated. My partner found a route by bus. So we took our kids and bags and started walking. Finding the right stop was challenging. #OrganicMaps doesn't seem to have bus lines and #CityMapper doesn't do great offline. The kids don't sleep well when traveling, so this was all compounded by several days of sleep deprivation.

Navigatng was difficult. We managed to find a hotel with a generator who let us use their wifi to update our maps.

So we traveled across the city. Trafic lights seemed to be the only things with power, though there were places those didn't work. Metro and tram were down. There seemed to be exra buses, all of them packed. The roads were packed with cars.

It wasn't posible to get a regional bus ticket since the ticket machines were all down. The bus we were looking for didn't seem to actually exist and none of the bus drivers could answer questions. My spanish is not great and I didn't focus a lot on improving it since I'm already overwhelmed with learning dutch.

After not being able to find the bus for a while, we were almost going to head back to the hotel and ask for a room. Then the power came back on. We got a regional bus ticket. After waiting for another hour or so, the bus never came. We went back to the hotel and were able to get a room.

Wifi at the hotel didn't work after power came back, cell service was still down. Duo is mad at me.

I have been off my disaster prep game for a bit, and was especially off while traveling. I have some notes...
1. Always have cash.
2. Download maps in advance (you can do this for google maps also, but you can't route without internet).
3. Download translation languages in advance.
4. Always have extra water and snacks.
5. Pack light so you don't have to haul massive amounts of luggage everywhere.
6. Keep battery packs topped off, where possible.

Traveling with kids is hard under normal conditions. It's funny, I'm actually more calm in a crisis. Our kids did really well despite walking for hours around Barcelona (or perhaps because of it).

It's interesting how the city prioritized cars by prioritizing power to traffic lights, but that just clogged everything with cars and made bus travel harder. The metro is generally better, imho, in Barcelona because it doesn't have the car problem. Barcelona appears to be deeply unprepared for actual emergencies. A lot of cities are.

This is a good reminder that solar power and distributed grids are really important. Dedicated power to mass transit like trains and metro would help evacuate the city. Better bike infrastructure makes it easier to get around when cars clog the streets. I can see how much work is being done in this area, but there's a lot of room to improve. Cars are basically the worst solution for several reasons, including that they caused the problem in the first place.

I hope Europe learns from this and continues to move towards greater resiliency. #ClimateChange is going to make things like this happen more often, and centralization makes small disasters larger and makes disaster response slower. Deploying a bunch of cops is not a solution to anything.

Edit: added note about batteries.