Barcelona: Perchance to Sleep
Three’s company. Cordelia (6) and William (11) are my travel companions on an adventure that began in Barcelona, the nearest direct flight into the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France that would become our home for the first two weeks of this stay.
Choosing to take my kids abroad alone as the world reopened was a decision I took lightly. With an almost blind intensity, I was driven to re-create the trip we had canceled last year, a month in France for total language immersion, during which I would work remotely and get to “play French,” too. After 11 years of dual-language efforts, it would be the kids’ first trip to France and my long overdue return to Provence, where I lived and learned French 1999-2000, and which I’ve sorely missed since getting engaged there in 2006.
Yet for all my talk, in the weeks before departure my anxiety spiked proportionately with the Delta variant. But not because of the Delta variant, per se. Looking back, my cold feet seemed rooted in questions around the deeper validity of our globetrotting. Even in non-pandemic times, travel is rich with opportunities for personal calamity, the stakes of which are simply higher when traveling with kids. I became afflicted with ill-timed introspection: do my children need to learn French? What is my obsession with this country and language really all about? And do we really need to go now, while the world’s just coming back to life and my husband is about to re-open a major restaurant that he now owns. My motivation better be more than nostalgia, more than narcissistic navel-gazing, more than romance. This needs to matter.
Repressing my fears, I agonized over our itinerary and filled our bags with every pharmaceutical under the sun, even though the pharmacists in France are better than many U.S. doctors. What if we are stuck in an airport because I don’t have the proper vaccine or test documentation? What if the kids get COVID or I get the variant and we have to quarantine? And pandemic-aside, so much can go wrong when traveling, from incomplete reservations, to now-essential apps that don’t download, to unchargeable devices, to lost passports, wallets, or keys. What if I screw up owing to stress or just normal human error, and we’re stuck without transport or, worse, a roof. Over the course of motherhood I’ve bragged that on mommy’s watch, accidents don’t happen. We foresee endangerment. We avert catastrophe. We have no margin of error regarding our children’s safety. That is what we do. So what if I slip? What if, like Simone Biles, I “lose my sense of air space”?
Picked up from tennis camp and plunged into an overnight flight, these kids are both insanely lucky and legitimately learning to be good travel troopers.
My biggest travel mistakes (granted from over 20 years ago) include losing my passport in Greece (when it fell out of my pocket on a bike ride), getting pick-pocketed in Madrid (from my purse hanging on the back of a chair), and missing a flight after mismanaging time in Amsterdam. Any of these missteps would be disastrous when traveling alone with children, and senseless rookie moves at that. But I’m out of practice. We’re all out of practice. And, to quote Stevie Nicks, “I’m getting older, too.” Keeping my wits on zero sleep is not as easy as it once was.
But my kids are also getting older. And with a few international trips and many domestic ones under their belts, they have become wonderful travelers. In the end our journey was charmed out of the gate, with Delta (airline, not variant) killing themselves to be lovely and safe. For the first time ever, I sat alone behind the kids, and the seat next to me was miraculously empty. While I was still online working around 10PM EST, my eleven-year-old reached back and closed my laptop, reminding me that I had told them how high the stakes were that we get some sleep.
I embarked exhausted, but for the first time ever, thanks to that second seat, I was able to sleep on an overnight flight. The flight was short, under six hours, so we all got a robust nap in lieu of a real sleep, but I’ve definitely had worse. We arrived in Barcelona with our acts more or less together, filing off the plane into to a small, quiet airport filled with very kind people who seemed genuinely welcoming and not looking to give us a hard COVID time. With a routine of frequently counting out loud “two kids, three backpacks, two handbags,” we made sure we didn’t space out and leave something vital lying around, namely my bags with passports, computers, pharmaceuticals, and, critically, my jewelry.
After making it to our wonderful SweetInn in Barcelona’s stolid neighborhood of Eixample, involving a small tech attack as the “digital keys” failed to load (really begging the question), the jet lag hit. I had failed to sleep-train these babies right, but I’d be damned if I didn’t jet-lag train them. Thus began a rollercoaster of a day where we traded energy comebacks with severe crashes. Cordelia had a tantrum at Gaudi’s Sagrada Família, William had an existential crisis at the beach, and I hit a wall before dinner. But we achieved our goal of making it to 9 PM…then slept 15 hours, missing the first half of our one full day.
It was worth it. With the sleep under our belts (and some genuinely weird jet-lag nightmares on my part), I did a run and got a facial at the loveliest medispa that just happened to be next to our Airbnb. Then we had a giddy, life-is-beautiful walk through Gracía to Park Güell along the Carrer de Verdi; one great walk can a trip make. Impromptu dress shopping for Cordelia en route to dinner completed this most charming day. Of course that night I didn’t sleep again owing to nerves around the next morning’s taxi-to-bus, bus-to-France, train-to-town schlep, but the kids were fine, and that’s all—or almost all—a traveling mommy needs.
My attempt to travel light resulted in Cordelia’s only having camp clothes to wear out, calling for a Little Women meets Pretty Woman moment.
Barcelona was a balm. A transition from the U.S., a shedding of fear, self-doubt, and pandemic wear-and-tear, and a prequel to France. It was our place to sleep, heal, and experience the thrill of muddling along with language baby steps. Although there so short a time, we planted roots, breakfasting all three mornings at the oddly named “Out of Secrets (by Farga)/The Total Daily Food” across the street, where the food was glorious and the very sweet staff was humorously hard to find. With patient Barcelonans, we spoke a wild mix of franglish peppered with some Italian and Greek left over from prior trips. The people were kind. It fixed and prepped us. We will never forget it.
Dispatching this from our first days in France, I think it’s safe to say this was a valid mission. That it is more than nostalgia, that we are all profoundly grateful to be here, and that we can’t wait to welcome Daddy on Monday.
More soon!
Lean on me! Steeper than the photo looks, we were surprised and delighted by the precipitous mount to Park Güell.