In PR you learn that it’s all about the spin. We knew Will wouldn’t be happy about being left behind to finish up fourth grade and baseball season, so the girls and I billed our recent trip to Europe not as a vacation sans the menfolk, but as an extension of school — chockful of language learning and homework. Not my kind of trip, he concluded on his own. Smart boy. It made our two-week trip somewhat guilt-free but not entirely.##M:[more]##
The first challenge of going away on vacation is getting ready to go on vacation. It’s exhausting. When we planned this trip months ago, Bill had blithely told us that it should be a fairly quiet time at work, no problem! Murphy’s Law, of course, kicked in, with a huge new global project coming in for landing just before our take-off. Though outwardly composed, I could detect the deer in the headlights panic in his eyes.
Thankfully, I could reach out to Alex, the High School North senior, recently graduated, who came over after school to play with Will and hang out; and thank goodness for Cindy and Maria and Stephanie and Margaret, friends and neighbors who filled in the gaps, brought over food, picked up from school, and bailed out when the bus was missed. It does take a village, especially when Mom is out-of-pocket for such a long time, the longest I’ve ever been away since the kids were born.
It’s a strange feeling to take a family vacation with only part of the family, but it was a wonderful opportunity to spend time with the girls who both were away last year. There were a few squabbles — it would have been even more stranger if there weren’t any — and as always, when you see things from a different place, quite literally, you have a chance to reflect and gain new perspective on life.
In Madrid we had a very confusing dinner at a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place called “El Mollete” with an upstairs dining area that was hot and noisy and pungent with cigaret smoke. This is one thing you very quickly realize when you’re traveling through Europe — they are not as progressive as we are about banning smoking in public places. Everyone, it seems, lights up — young, old, men, women, fashionable and not-so-fashionable. We take our smoke-free restaurants for granted, but never will again.
But I digress from our confusing dinner. Katie had read about this restaurant, much vaunted, in the New York Times, so we decided to give it a shot. First, there was no menu. The waiter rattled off some foods, and did some charades — vaca, he explained, using his fingers as horns on his head — then motioned fish by slithering his hands together. Okay, we nodded, game to be adventurous.
But the beef was marbled with fat and we blanched and waved it away. Then the artichokes arrived with little green toppings we took to be vegetable shoots, until Molly put one in her mouth, gagged, and spit the whole little thing out into her napkin. Was it a fish, sardine, an eel, or a mini-snake? It was one of the above but she’s not sure she wants to know for sure.
We think of the Liberty Bell as old, and Plymouth Rock, and then you go to Europe and see cathedrals and town squares and jagged ruins on the hillside that date back not hundreds of years, but thousands, back to the Roman times and the period before Christ. You understand why religion was such a central theme of art and literature of those times (though I’d be okay if it were a long time before I saw another picture of a saint being hung on the cross). Faith, literally, was at the heart of the village in the form of the church. Many of them still stand today, visible from the windows of the train as you are chugging through the countryside.
The girls and I tromped through the art galleries and cathedrals of Spain, Italy, and France. We ate our way through the culture, sipping sangria, tasting tapas, and crunching through crusty fresh bread and cheese. We sat at the wooden tables at Quatre Gats in Barcelona, the pub where a young Pablo Picasso and his fellow artists pursued their muses and spirits, and we followed the trail of international celebrity at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.
We were shameless tourists in Venice, riding with a gondolier who sang and chatted as he paddled our way past the home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and all the other slowly sinking facades of a living medieval city. In Florence, we made our pilgrimage to the Duomo, also known as Brunelleschi’s dome, that ancient marvel of engineering, started in 1296 and completed in 1436. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how something like that could have been built without modern day cranes and technology.
In Paris, we visited Sacre Coeur, that lovely basilica on the northern hill of the city, and I made the girls tromp through Pere LaChaise cemetery, morbid, maybe, but fascinating, as this is the place where Chopin, my favorite composer is buried, along with French singer Edith Piaf, writers Apollinaire, Moliere and Oscar Wilde. Wild, oui, vraiment! Our last stop was Nantes, two hours west of Paris, where we saw a real castle, with a moat, drawbridge, and I could swear, a princess in the very top window.
My first thud back to reality was when I couldn’t get into my computer at work. I had forgotten my password because I hadn’t used it for two weeks. They say you shouldn’t write down your password but in the future I’m obviously going to have to do that.
My second was realizing that the bill I had strategically tucked out of the bill payer’s sight (coincidentally known as “Bill”) came due during my two-week absence. In an effort to ward off the finance charge, I showed up at the merchant’s counter to plead my case: that I had been out of town. No sympathy at all. The penalty? $39!
My biggest thud back to reality will be when we receive the bill to pay for the trip. Man, I’m really going to need a vacation!
