A Raison D'Etre

I love this picture of Raf because he's standing barefoot on La Grande Plage in Biarritz, France.

When I first pleaded for us to go to Europe as a family, I begged for Italy. It's my favorite European country and the place where I tend to feel most "at home" when traveling because I lived there for a few years as a teenager and have been back twice in recent years. It is familiar and easy to get around, comfortable in its chaos, a good place for families, kids, women, romance, art and food. I knew we could find a fabulous villa for a few weeks and rent a car to make day trips. I could guarantee a good time for a trip to Italy: food, wine, gelato, shopping, culture... it's all easily accessible. No one would make fun of our attempts to speak the language. The kids could eat as much pizza, bread and pasta as they wanted. C'mon, I said, it'll be a good introduction to Europe for our kids.

But Raf was steadfast in his wishes. If we're going to Europe, I've gotta surf, he said, citing a few of the famous surf cities that he's seen on his favorite surf docu-reality show Drive-Thru Europe. Kelly Slater and his gang of American surfers set up house in Hosseger (on the southern Atlantic coastline of France) and surfed Biarritz and Anglet. They crossed the border to Spain and surfed Zurriola and San Sebastian. But when they tried to surf in Rome, it wasn't as beautiful, the waves were choppy, the water was muddy-looking. The only saving grace was the food.

Okay, okay, I finally conceded. And then we started to plan our trip. We made Biarritz and San Sebastian our first stops so that Raf could bring his board on the plane and then ship it back home; then, since we're in Spain anyway, we'd see Barcelona. Since it was so close to the South of France, we'd tour around that area next. Paris is the best place to fly home from, so we decided to tack on a few days to tour Paris and see some famous sights with the girls. And then the trip was set. Italy seemed a little too far, a little too "much" to get to this time around, so we didn't push it. Another trip, we decided.

The irony is that Raf isn't surfing this trip. He decided it would be too much of a hassle to bring his board when he didn't even know the waves and could just rent a board here (which was a whole other drama when I mentioned this to him -- it's just not the same, he said, it'll take me days to feel comfortable on someone else's board.). But the trip has taken on a different flavor while we've been here. It's become an experiment in culture, both the culture of European travel and the internal culture of our own little family. How well do we work together as a unit? Can our kids exist on a diet of bread and ice cream? Can we just enjoy the moments as they present themselves?

And so this image of Raf, enjoying the what is-ness of Biarritz, a side trip on our European journey, means a lot to me... When I took it, I wondered if he had been contemplating how Biarritz really brought us to Europe, and whether he was bittersweet about the way that the trip had changed its flavor long before he stepped onto the shell-packed shore.

Turns out he was really just thinking about the Cuban cigars he wanted to buy in San Sebastian later that evening.

The Ritz & Glitz of Biarritz

We drove up to Biarritz in France yesterday. Because it's in France, we had asked Emy (the owner of the apartment we're renting) what we needed in order to cross the border. Passports, for sure, we said, but what else? Money? Travel documents?

Emy and her friend Beatrix laughed. No, no, you just drive over.

And so it was that we found ourselves in France after about an hour. The easiest part really was crossing the border. We found it much harder to get out of San Sebastian -- we'd made a few wrong turns in the city and couldn't find the right expressway... and then realized that, because most signs are written in Basque, even our knowledge of where we were headed was tested because the cities are spelled and pronounced very differently in the Basque Country -- it's not French, it's not Spanish, and it really doesn't resemble either. For example, Bayonne in France, a main city on my map of France (which was all I had besides Raf's iPhone and Google Maps) is spelled Baiona on all the signs leading out of San Sebastian. I couldn't figure it out until I tried to say it out loud and then it clicked that we were headed in the right direction.

But Frantzia? It's not even on the map! I said, swearing as we left another gare du peage (toll booth). Say it out loud, though, and it makes sense: France. Duh.

One note about the toll booths that I love: you don't always have to drive up and talk to a toll booth worker. You can also just throw the right amount of change into a basket and then go on. I love that. Raf is not a big fan of the use of coins for 1- and 2-Euro currency -- he thinks it gets lost in your pocket. See this? he asked me yesterday, holding a big pile of coins in his hand. This is like 12 bucks! I would have thought it was like 76 cents! And so we used many of these pesky coins at the gares du peage.

Okay, I'm digressing. Finally, after several wrong turns and a genuine love of roundabouts (the civilized European answer to "flipping-a-U-ie"), we arrived in Biarritz and parked on an outlying street for free rather than fight for a parking garage space. We wandered around the town, which reminded us very much of Manhattan Beach: beautiful little boutiques and shoppers sharing sidewalk space with surfers in half-pulled-down wetsuits walking barefoot with their sandy boards. Lots of adorable sidewalk cafes and pizzerias - really, very much like Manhattan Beach or any other upscale beach town in Southern California, just French-ified. It felt very familiar, very easy to understand and jump right into. At one point during our lunch, at a cute little cafe overlooking the beach, I commented to Raf that even the servers and their attire could be mistaken for any beach city in California: tanned girls in pretty ponytails with shoulder tattoos wearing flip-flops, guys in long cargo shorts with day-old scruff. If we hadn't been eating a pizza with peppers, olives and a half-boiled egg on top, I could have believed that we had never left home.

Afterward, we walked onto the beach. The sand reminded us of Maui's shell-caked sand, full of interesting colors and textures. The color of the water is incredibly soft, the blues and greens of Monet's Giverny paintings set by the seashore. There are giant rock formations that border the bay-like beach and several surfers catching waist-high fun waves like you'd see at El Porto in Manhattan Beach (another similarity). In fact, it seemed like a perfect place to learn to surf, and we saw a few surf schools out there, paddling around. We'd heard that the Roxy Jam was there as well as a rock festival featuring Iggy and the Stooges, but we must have arrived in-between events because we didn't see anything Roxy-related.

The Grand Plage is beautiful to look at, with colorful striped umbrella/canopies and gorgeous little families collecting shells and enjoying the seaside weather, despite the gray skies. As usual, we sampled les glaces (ice cream), this time from Monsieur Lopez's stand -- I've found that my French truly shines at ice cream stands, where I can order anything with aplomb. But beyond that, the water was significantly chillier than in San Sebastian and none of us really felt like we needed to hang out there for very long. We decided to make our way back to Spain before the afternoon was over and, after getting a little lost on the way back to the expressway, we arrived an hour later to sparkling skies in sunny San Sebastian. Hola!