A family travels Spain day one: getting there and so not bragging how

The first host to greet us in Badalona is a curiously light orange cockroach wriggling on  his back with glee on the bathroom step. “Hola, welcome to Spain!” I look over at my bedraggled daughter whose face is looking alarmingly like her 95 year old grandfather, Mille, except he was very handsome and usually smiling. We have been traveling for twenty four hours at this point.

“Honey, it’s just best if you don’t look.”

“Oh God, Mom, is it a bug, is it big?”

”Likely bigger than you may anticipate…”

This is so not an Instagram moment and this is so why I kinda love it. I do take a picture though and send it to Eva, our lovely AirBnB host. She writes back immediately:

”Is he at home?”

I almost write, “He looks very at home to me, like he’s lived here all his life. My question is: does he live with a large extended family?”

I refrain. Instead I ask, “Yes, he’s in the bathroom. He looks like the only one though, there are none in the kitchen. The suite is beautiful, thank you. Where is the soap for the bathroom?”

Eva cheerfully writes back, “We had but no guest use so we throw away.”

Nora helps herself to a pack of rectangular digestive biscuits (our breakfast) while I bludgeon our room mate with the end of a complimentary umbrella. There are three in fact. Guests find three umbrellas very useful, but hell no to body soap.

The suite is right beside Santa Maria, a lovely big white church with a large bell tower that chimes the time every 15 minutes. Did I mention we were RIGHT BESIDE the church? BONG BONG BONG another fifteen minutes of your life have passed before you, you are expiring as we speak. There are no vespers at 12:30am we are simply reminding you of your mortality BONG BONG BONG and the need to attend confession tomorrow – yes you – BONG BONG BONG – you filthy murderer.

At this point I see the suite has a sign “no pasar” underneath the staircase that blocks the entrance to the “grotto”. This is a dark lantern lit stairway down to a dark bottomless Hades. No problem. I do not feel the urge to pass.

Nora and I head up the spiral staircase to three very cute white stone bedrooms with high posted ceilings and cheerful floral bedcovers. She takes the smallest bedroom. She’s always been one to choose the smallest. I don’t think it’s because she’s self sacrificing, I think she likes to feel cozy. Rooms can be too big for Miss Nora. Or perhaps she chooses this room because it is the furthest away from the entrance to hell? Who knows. She unpacks her suitcase meticulously and her first thirteen year old thought is, “I have NO IDEA what I’m going to wear tomorrow!”

“Good night, honey, if you get scared up there you can crawl in with me.”

”K.”

I head downstairs for a lovely refreshing midnight shower, the slight orange scent of no name brand dish soap rising in the steam. I wonder where my husband and son are.

You see, at the Vancouver airport, about 24 hours earlier, we were stopped at the British Airways gate because our son’s passport expires in mid April and one isn’t allowed to travel with a soon to expire passport. Take note. Three savvy parents on this job and all three of us didn’t see it coming. Poor guy turns red and stoic while we assure him it isn’t his fault.

My husband has this way of dealing with customer service that always makes me a little anxious and a little delighted all at once. He learns the agent’s name and then leans in for some familiar banter, like they’ve known each other for years. He charms his way in with a very first responder Alpha male manner, big smile on his face.  It would be the same manner he’d use to rescue a befuddled drug addict out of a burning building. “You can choose to open this door, that is your choice in this crisis. You can choose to not open this door and then I will choose to bash it down. ” This worked earlier at the foreign exchange when “Munisha” was offering to charge us 1.68 and he found it for 1.56 online. He reasoned with her, “So Munisha, what’s a guy to do with this?” He pulled up figures on his phone until she huffed impatiently and then confessed that he could order the transaction on line and she’d give him the money that way at the rate he saw when he googled it.

”Well thanks Munisha, I appreciate your help today. Bring it in.”

”What, sir?” Munisha stared at him, blank faced, her false lashes and press on nails glittering under the airport lights.

”Bring it in, Munisha.”

He offered her a “fist bump” through the foreign exchange glass and she rolled her eyes, cracked a smile in that “I have an uncle just like you” sort of way, and fist bumped him back. He turns to our teens, “See that kids? Always pays to have a conversation. WE just saved ourselves a hundred and twenty bucks.”

But a fist pump was not enough for Nathan at British Airways. “So, what do you suggest we do, Nathan. I’m sure you’ve had other people in this situation, buds. None of us came across any literature about soon to expire passports.” Our buds, Nathan, offered us two tickets for Spain the next day at no extra charge while father and son stayed behind to expedite a new passport. Nora and I were on our own.

Our flights to Spain were terrific actually and I thought I had navigated the metro to Barcelona well until we got downtown. At that point, none of the blue red or purple lines we needed actually intercepted at the various stops we tried. Badalona should only be half an hour or so outside of Barcelona. We gave it a good three hour effort to get there like champs on transit…and then hailed a cab right at the tipping point of hysteria.

This is why I have no further pictures. I haven’t seen Barcelona yet. I’ve only seen underneath Barcelona.

Like I say, so not an Instagram moment. That’s precisely why I am sharing it. If I am going to share my life in any useful or responsible way, which is my aim, I must show the victories and failures. If it isn’t a story about the slow slide into the great good, then it’s just bragging or conversely, complaining. So here I am, about to take you on a trip with me to Spain for three weeks. Bugs, glory, and all. Love Lucia