Off-season travel is a great bargain.   Pairing Barcelona and the island of Mallorca is as delightful a pairing as Manchego cheese and red wine.  Here’s a trip you can take independently that I would recommend highly. When I travel, I try to spend time in a place and in order to get know the people and the culture.  I prefer independent travel, which is not to knock tours.  Tours are a great way to see many places and learn a bit about each one.  Tours can be a terrific introduction to places you would like to return for a longer visit on your own.

I made this trip in February.  I started by tracking airfares on Kayak.com.  Kayak (and other similar sites like Farewatcher.com) will email you daily or weekly and you can monitor fluctuating airfares on multiple carriers.  Using Kayak, I was able to book a round-trip non-stop flight on Continental for $425.00 from New York to Barcelona.  Then, I found flights to Palma de Mallorca from Barcelona for about 45 euros.  The euro was about $1.30 to 1 euro.  You can check the exchange rates for any exchange at www.XE.com.

Using a few guidebooks and my favorite hotel search site, www.venere.com, I found a wonderful hotel with a great location in the center of the old city known as the Barri Gotic.  The Hotel Colon (www.hotelcolon.es) in the heart of Barcelona and it's close to everything.   You can walk to La Rambla and to the metro which is incredibly easy to use. I've never been anywhere before where a yellow (yes, like the yellow brick road) line leads you from one station to another. Barcelona is so easy to navigate.  You certainly do not need a car.

The Hotel Colon overlooks a plaza and a lovely cathedral. There was a street market right in the plaza while we were staying there. Typically a room at the Colon is 200-275 euros per night.  Off- season, it was half that.  Without asking, we were upgraded to a room with a balcony and a view of the Gothic cathedral; the Capella de Santa Llucia. There is a sister hotel alongside the Colon that is less expensive and smaller, but still has nice service and a great location.

The staff was friendly and extremely helpful. There is a nice bar where you can sit on a sofa, sip wine and just hang out. There is also an outdoor cafe and a restaurant.  

With four full days, you can see many highlights of Barcelona.  A stroll along the famous La Rambla, a visit to the amazing Antoni Gaudi sites such as Casa Batllo and La Sagrada Familia, and a visit to the Picasso Museum.  That leaves plenty of time for tapas, tapas, and more tapas. 

The concept of tapas is so amazing I don't understand why it hasn't caught on everywhere.  Tiny plates of amazing dishes.  Bread toasted and rubbed with garlic, tomato, olive oil and sprinkled with a little sea salt.  Gambas (shrimp).  Little grilled sardines.  There is a nearly endless array of choices.  How great is it that you don't have to commit to one giant plate?  I was born to eat tapas.  

By far, the best tapas bar in all of Barcelona is Inopia.    Owned by the brother of the world-renowned chef Ferran Adria's brother, I had seen Inopia on Mario Batali's show "Spain...on the Road Again" with Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Bittman of the NY Times, and Claudia Bassols.  We went twice.  It's social, it's fun, it's so delicious I cannot describe how good the food is.  The wine was not too shabby either.

It’s astonishing how attractive people in Spain are and even more astonishing is the fact that they don’t weigh four hundred pounds each.  If I lived there, I’d have a weight problem and I’d certainly develop angina from all the cholesterol I’d consume. 

First and foremost, I’d consume pork products daily. Iberian jamon for breakfast, chorizo at least once a day, and I would have to have frequent, large samples of a wide variety of sausages.  Moving on, for snacks I’d nibble on Spanish cheeses.  I’d offset the cholesterol from the cheese It’s astonishing how attractive people in Spain are and even more astonishing is the fact that they with copious amounts of red wine.  The vino tinto would cancel out the cheese because we all know how good red wine is for us, don’t we?

If all that didn’t kill me in a few months time, the desserts definitely would.  First, can we talk about churros?  Fried dough.  Lots of it.  On a plate and served with something akin to hot chocolate, but it’s really more like thick chocolate pudding.  The churro is dipped into the thick chocolate drink and devoured for breakfast or for a snack.  That sound you just heard was me sighing with desire and unbuttoning my pants because even the thought of this gooey, wonderful mess makes my waist expand.  Churros are made upon request and you can watch the entire process at almost any stand that sells them. 

Another popular and seductive treat is waffles.  Waffles served with oozy, drizzly, thick chocolate and—if you’d like even more decadence---ice cream.  Like I said, how do these people not explode?  Irresistible!

It would have been impossible to leave Barcelona, if it weren’t that the next stop was Mallorca (also spelled Majorca); one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean.  They are a thirty- minute plane ride or a longer ferry ride from a number of coastal cities in Spain.

You can manage to get around without a car, but a rental is easy to do right in the airport and there are a wide variety of choices and price points.  Driving first into the city of Palma de Mallorca to sight see and shop, the scariest part was parking.  Finally finding a deck, as Americans, we didn’t know how to pay and exit the deck!  When a kind, English-speaking soul helped us---there is a giant machine---we learned that American credit cards do not have the requisite micro-chip that European machines require!  Fortunately, the machine also took cash. 

There’s great shopping in Palma and a wonderful cathedral with a crazy, unexpected alter.  You feel as though you are in a Walt Disney World exhibit.  Designed to make you feel as though you are under the sea, fish heads jut out of the wall and the stained glass is wavy and aquamarine.  The Cathedral is situated on the waterfront and if you are lucky enough to approach Palma from the water, it is a beautiful sandstone edifice.

I’ve saved the best for last.  The Spanish island of Mallorca in the Balearic Islands seems to be the only place in the world where a pastry called ensaimada is made.  I was introduced to this unique taste treat on the PBS show “Spain…On the Road Again” with Mario Batali, Mark Bittman-the New York Times food critic, Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols.  This series provides great armchair travel through Spain, its best sites and (even better!) its best foods and wines.  Mario ferreted out the best ensaimada in all Mallorca.  High on my priority list of places to go, it was a bit of a challenge to find.  Deep in the heart of Palma de Mallorca, a tiny hole-in-the wall place on a tiny side street contains one of the world’s wonders.  In Ca’n Miguel you can find the lightest most ephemeral, amazing pastry I have ever tasted.  Wound into a spiral and baked, this creation melts into your mouth and left me unable to speak.  Cooked with no one knows how much pure lard (yes, lard) I would eat it twice a day if I could.  The name apparently comes from the Arabic word saïm which means pork lard.  You can get ensaimadas filled with cream or plain.  Although the cream is delicious, it’s so good on its own that I prefer the plain.  Large ensaimadas are the size of a pie and when you leave Mallorca you see people carrying them back to the mainland in pastry boxes handled as carefully as infants.  They are every bit as precious.

Reluctantly leaving Palma, we headed to our final destination on Mallorca. La Residencia, located in the town of Deia, is one of the loveliest hotels I've ever stayed in.  Deia (which is listed in 1000 Places to See Before You Die)  is about a half an hour away from the airport and from the city of Palma.  There is a bus that stops right outside the resort or you if you drive, beware the winding mountain roads and especially beware of the roundabouts! 

The hotel is like staying at a friend's very upscale home.  It's warm and gracious with wonderful amenities.  There is a first class restaurant called El Olivo (Sting has been known to eat here...yes,  that Sting!).  The food was made with attention to taste and presentation and was perfection.

There is also a spa and an indoor pool.  The spa treatments are fabulous and every single person who is employed in this resort makes you feel welcome.  Off-season rates are extremely affordable and the weather is not hot in winter, but is definitely mild.

The scenery is stunning.  You can see the mountains above you and the Mediterranean below.  It's hard to imagine a better place to spend a quiet week.  This is a perfect escape venue.

The village of Deia is a postcard pretty town.  Set in the hillside on the island of Mallorca, the town is a stone vision that looks much as it must have looked a hundred years ago.  The homes are charming with gorgeous flowering vines, palm trees, stone patios, and hanging pots with flowers spilling over.  A walk through the village is like a walk back through time.  You can hear almost nothing except for birds chirping, the clang of a bell dangling from the neck of a stray goat, and an occasional (but rare) car driving up the mountain.  When the morning fog lifts from the mountain and the mist disappears, the sun casts shadows on the ever-changing terrain.  You can look down to the sparkling deep crystal blue of the Mediterranean.  I loved pretending I lived in Deia.  I fantasized about writing every day on my patio, surrounded by all this beauty and silence.  My muse was with me there.