Travel Day

Travel days are tough. Planning a trip is so much fun, I tend to forget the sacrifice of hours of packing, getting to the airport, then getting through security and customs so that we can be packed into a tin vessel miles above the earth for half a day. And that when we finally land, we're in a different time zone and we're motion woozy and hungry and have to pee and can't read the signs all at the same time, and when someone speaks to us in a foreign language, we want to admit that we can barely form our own names, much less conjugate French/Spanish/Italian/Catalan/East Texan...

I'm writing this on the second hop of our journey to Barcelona. On the first flight, I watched the final Twilight movie, played solitaire with Emme, and got chewed out by the pilot (don't ask). Thank god for the French, though - Charles de Gaulle has it's fair share of amazing "fast" food (picture of my bulgar and salt-cured tuna salad below). 

This flight is far shorter, which is great because we are far less energetic than when we left California. Emme is passed out next to me, sprawled on the tray table and her stuffed penguin; she was an ashy green color as we waited for this flight on our layover in Paris and I'm surprised she even made it onto the plane. Serena and Marlowe are laying across Raf, who is trying to catch some Zs in the small seat between them. I've slept a bunch today/yesterday... or am I now in tomorrow?... and I'm too out of it to get excited about being 30 minutes from Barcelona...

But... I have a feeling we'll get there.... And we won't want to leave...

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!

A 10-hour flight with kids, an "after" and "before" story

These were taken en route to Bilbao, Spain, the second leg of our European journey.

For comparison's sake, this was taken before... Before the limo ride from our house to LAX. Before the 2 and a half hour wait for our flight to Paris. Before I watched the first 20 minutes of "Nine" twice and then heard that the audio/video would be shut down for the entire flight. Before the lady next to me moved the arm rest out of the way and may as well have sat *on* me rather than next to me. Before yet another of my kids' iTouches came in fatal contact with water, its dreaded villain. Before our family's near meltdown at the currency exchange at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, due to no ice cream stands and the adversarial relationship that the French seem to have with both air conditioning and ice. Before I discovered the reason we hadn't gotten our luggage from the carousel was, heck, we were in the wrong place... no wonder everyone else was gone. Before we realized that it was a good thing I only packed two suitcases because apparently they don't rent Suburbans in Europe (their version is an Audi 4-door with manual transmission). Before we drove an hour through Spain and fell in love with the green countryside. Before we landed at our pretty apartment in San Sebastian, with views of the beautiful bay-like beach, saw a few topless sunbathers , an orange striped banana hammock, and a parade or rally for something or another. Before our kids insisted that we go back to the apartment at 9:30 at night to get bathing suits because the sun was still setting and the waves were warm and the lights illuminating the surrounding boardwalk came on and made the whole city appear to be magically bejeweled.

Basically, before we fell in love with San Sebastian and decided that yeah, we could do that 10-hour flight and 2-hour connection to Bilbao again, if it meant we could be here.