The sun dawned…well, it came up anyway. Saturday was a humid day so it wasn’t awful in the morning but it wasn’t whatcha call “pleasant”. What did dawn all shiny and dewy was Lisa who awoke as, officially, The Birthday Girl. It must be noted that she was almost completely in the dark on the details of this trip. She usually plans the vast majority of our travel, with input from me of course, but a) she likes doing it usually, and b) experience = expertise, she’s very good at it. That said, we realized awhile back that now that we are traveling so much more it would really kind of stink for her to be burdened with all of it. So, this trip is my big coming out party as a maker of happenings on the road. The big logistical things (flights, car rentals, accommodations) all seem to be in order, so all of my panic is reserved for day-to-day plans not going well. I’ve done the work, though, and all should be well. Just before we left, however, a couple of friends recommended the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco (think super-fancy aquarium) and we belatedly added it as a possibility. Based on the weather forecast for today, this seemed to be the right day. How glamorous we thought! Jaunt to yet another country to see something exotic and fun, maybe find a cool place to have a meal. Now that is a heck of a birthday!

Yeeeeaaaah… no.

It all started out well enough, we plotted our route in GPS and made for the mountains. It was a beautiful drive with lots of grand scenery we wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Truly beautiful. Going into Monaco is actually kind of interesting, it required the blasting of some serious tunnels to make a route that didn’t require either mountain goats or helicopters. There’s a second tunnel a little while later that is like a giant spiral staircase that goes down hundreds of feet; pretty clever, it would have required a lot more space, or a lot steeper tunnel, to lose that much altitude. Once we got into Monaco proper things got… well, bad. Imagine a baby with a little bowl of spaghetti on the tray of their high chair. The baby turns the bowl over, spilling the noodles into a complicated pile. The baby then spits up a little onto the pile.

This is the system of roads and tunnels in Monaco.

Google maps actually did a credible job of navigating us through the mess, but there were two serious problems. First, sometimes the instructions were so bizarre or inscrutable that we simply didn’t trust them. “There’s no way we’re supposed to go in to that parking deck just to exit it heading in another direction, right?” In hindsight yes, that’s exactly what we probably should have done. The second problem was that we coudn’t follow certain instructions, because the police had key roads blocked. We still don’t know why; our French is still pretty rusty and the officer we spoke to, while responding “yes” to “tu parle Anglais?”, proceeded to explain the situation in French. What we know is that it took almost two hours to not navigate our way to the Museum and by that time we were running at a very high frustration level, plus we were hungry, and we were still no closer to going to the Museum(!).

Trying to salvage the Big Day, we made for Èze. Èze is a teeny village on the coast with some absolutely bonkers views of the sea. There is a medieval walled town on top of one hill, full of winding streets that just ooze with character. It actually is on our agenda to go to Èze tomorrow, but by all that is holy if we can make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear we are grabbing an ear and some string in Èze. The lynchpin of our itinerary was lunch at Château de la Chèvre d’Or (house of the golden goat, more or less). What the hell, maybe they can seat us a day early. O ho! It is to laugh! As far as I can tell the place is perpetually booked, and only my reserving a table months in advance had got us in tomorrow. So, after a mildly harrowing drive up way-too-narrow streets, Èze was basically a bust. Cool cool.

At this point we’re just hungry, so I dig into my bag of restaurant potentials for the coming week and settle on Babel Babel, a med-esque tapas-esque joint that was supposed to be casual but yummy. The day had one last kick in the jimmies for us, though; parking in Nice was not… ahem… nice. (I get one. That was it. Be grateful, we’re spending several days here.) In fact, it wasn’t just bad it was treacherous. For example, they have those very modern signs that not only direct you to different municipal lots but also key an updated tally of how many spaces were available. It’s smart, allowing drivers to make good decisions about where to park and spreading the cars over many areas. The problem is, they lie. The lot we settled on was close and supposedly had 80-some spaces free. Great. It takes 2 minutes or so to go around the block. The sign above the lot itself indicates that there are 54-some spaces available. Wow, that was fast, but ok. Then you enter the lot, and the indicator for the floor says “zero, keep going”. Down we go, four levels, each one saying no spots were available. Finally, on the bottom level, after circling a couple of times, we manage to secure a spot. Up we go and off to food at Babel Babel. Thank all the gods, they came through with a decent meal. The tide begins to turn!

We make it back to our lodging and just go to ground for a little bit to recuperate until dinner. We hang out, we listen to music, we chat… basically we reset ourselves. The day isn’t over yet! We dress ourselves as nicely as we can on this trip (i.e. a nice print dress for Lisa, slacks and a golf shirt for me) and make for the hotel restaurant. Dinner was divine. I have no idea what Michelin currently thinks of the joint, but we loved it. As is tradition over here, we had the table for as long as we wanted it so we dawdled, nursed our drinks, and sauntered through the menu. The weather was accommodating and the view was spectacular. One last kick in the teeth (from my point of view) was that I’d forgotten her actual physical birthday present back in Portugal, so instead we visualized opening it up as I described each step to her. Honestly, not sure it would have gone over better if the actual item had been there. We turned the day around pretty well by the end, I’m pleased to report. It’s a long trip still to come, there will be plenty of chances for greatness.

The short answer is that we’re fortunate beyond words for how well it has turned out. This isn’t actually obvious at first glance. The apartment we’ve moved in to, which we were smitten with at first glance, has turned out to have a couple of almost-literally fatal flaws, to the point where we are moving out early to get to a new place. That story will probably come in more detail later, but the fact that we are packing up everything we own, again, slightly less than 4 months after we did it the last time, is certainly not optimal. Our first trip out of the country was not a resounding success. I mean let’s not kid ourselves, we saw and did some really amazing things, but we were overwhelmed at times in Barcelona and the chaos in the middle of our trip to France left us off-balance even as we tried to salvage the experience (which we did by and large). Certain goals that we set for ourselves and our health are more work-in-progress than mission-accomplished; as anybody’s therapist will tell them, the one thing you are certain to take with you wherever you go is yourself. I remember as a kid I heard “wherever you go, there you are” and thought “well that’s dumb.” Hang on, younger me, it’ll make sense one day. How exactly is it so amazing then?

Shockingly, we’ll explain by telling you a long story. Way back when we were in the planning stages of uprooting our lives and moving to a foreign country, we’d talk about why exactly we wanted to do it. For my (John’s) part, there was this hypothetical story I’d keep going back to. “Whenever we’re in a big city like New York or London or … wherever, you read the paper or Time Out Istanbul or or or … and read about all sorts of amazing cultural events that don’t even make the news. Like, when Lisa surprised me with a trip to New York to see Hamilton while the original cast was still there (<—brag), we dug around in the papers and found a little play that you never heard of outside of the city, called “The Woodsman”, and by golly if it wasn’t one of our most favorite theatrical experiences ever. These things are happening, all the time. We’re always seeing reviews of gallery exhibitions or plays or concerts that are taking place in far-flung corners of the world, and they might as well be in Narnia. How amazing would it be if we could actually go to these things?” Side note: whenever we travel to an English-speaking destination we make a point of rooting around for local theater options; we’ve had fantastic experiences in places like Dublin and London. More stories for another time. Anyway.

A couple weeks ago my news feed brought up a review of an exhibition going on at the British Museum in London, The World of Stonehenge. It sounds absolutely fascinating. Interesting. I mention it to Lisa and we both think it sounds neat. Then, a couple days later, another review pops up: A Century of the Artist’s Studio. It looks really fascinating, if maybe a little brief. The mental tea kettle starts to rattle. Then the dominoes start to teeter: in Oxford at this same time is Pissarro: Father of Impressionism. Now the kettle is whistling. We do some quick checks of the calendar, fiddle with a half-dozen websites and, just like that, we’ve got three days at the end of May where we fly to London, see a couple of amazing exhibitions, hop on the train for a day trip to Oxford to see the Pissarro and just sight-see one of the great universities of the world, then back to London to chomp on a Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery that we didn’t even know was there when we planned the trip. Do you see what I mean? Even now that we’re paying closer attention, a pretty fantastic event was going on that is aligned perfectly with our interests and we’d never have heard about it, but here we are seeing it.

Another story. Lisa likes the beach. Waaaaay more than I do, although I’m coming around. Back in the States we would occasionally try to work out a trip every couple of years to somewhere with decent beaches so we could sun ourselves and splash around a bit. This year, she says she’d like some beach time for her birthday. No problem. Plan A is to head to the Greek islands to hit the Mediterranean, but the truth is we were just there a couple years ago and that trip left a mark (another story for another time) so maybe give that a rest. So instead, right now we’re in the middle of planning a few weeks in the south of France and the Loire valley. We’ll splash around in Nice for awhile, then head up into the center of the country and take a gander at a dozen gorgeously-restored castles and their magnificent gardens.

Oh, and in October we’re taking the Orient Express to Venice to spend a week, and we’re trying to sort out which cities’ Christmas markets we want to visit this year. And when we aren’t hitting the road, we live in a charming European city complete with cobblestone streets and an easy pace to life. Whatever travails we’re going through, bumps in the road or whatever you’d like to call it, the truth of the matter is that we are living exactly the life we’d hoped to be living; we know it, and we’re so so grateful for it.