The Sisters Visit

You can't beat the first foray. For me there's no rush that compared to arriving in a foreign land for the first time as an unsupervised adult. I was lucky enough to have experienced this feeling twice before; the trips I'd taken prior to my current odyssey had been so short that the novelty never wore off. That feeling was sure gone now. After traveling for more than two months I'd long grown used to being away. The initial intoxication is replaced by subtler satisfactions: becoming a better traveler through the practice; a new view of your life back home; primary knowledge of a people, a nation, a continent. But you'll never get back that first high.

The next best thing is to see someone else get it. And when it's someone you love, it's a wonderful thing to witness. Neither of my sisters had been to Europe and this trip was their college graduation present. My dad had agreed to send them before I left home but less than a month before we were supposed to meet the plane tickets still had not been bought. But he did come through and the plan was set: rendezvous in Barcelona, travel down the coast to Valencia, then head to Madrid from where they'd fly back home. I took a train from Segovia to Madrid and then another to Barcelona. We had a very happy reunion at the hostel and then went out exploring.

Barcelona has all the basic requirements to be counted among the great cities of the world: beautiful streets and buildings; a rich cultural and arts scene; cool stores, bars, museums, et cetera et cetera. But they come for the party, for that uniquely Spanish brand of languid hedonism. And no place in Spain does it like Barcelona.

A little adventure wasn't long in coming. After some drinks and dancing I suggested we round out the night with a stroll up La Rambla, the main tourist drag in Barcelona. By day it makes for a family-friendly paseo full of flower merchants, souvenir hawkers, and street artists who'll do your portrait in five minutes. At night you leave the kids at home. African prostitutes solicit johns in the pale, lurid wash of the streetlights. Drug dealers softly call their wares as they walk past. Thieves lurk in the shadows. But one cool thing about Barcelona and Europe in general is that people can hang out on the streets doing whatever they want and the police don't hassle them like they would in the states. The locals take full advantage of this and so despite all the sketchy characters on La Rambla there's hundreds of people around, so it feels safe.

It was on our way there that we fell into it. Our guide was to be a drunken young Scot saying something about a "Sherlock Holmes" bar. I was a little skeptical but my sister Anne seemed to have no doubts and so I followed on. He led us to some random apartment building and up the back stairwell. "Here's where we get Taken!" I joked. But instead of getting kidnapped we found ourselves in a space that looked more like an apartment than a bar. But a bar it was - and one of the coolest I've drank at in my life, let alone in Spain. Soft light from worn, gold sconces; silhouettes in oval frames; good tunes, good crowd. My youngest sister, just out of college, conversed with a chic Mexicana expat who maybe gave her a glimpse of just how cool adult life can be. We couldn't have asked for a better first night or a better town to start in.

Their visit wasn't without its setbacks. We all had our share of bad moods, stupid spats, and a few logistical headaches as well, the most memorable of which featured a cab driver in Valencia screaming at me at the top of his lungs as we raced to catch a bus and I nervously expressed he might be going the wrong way. But that was all nothing. The time with my sisters in Spain was the best of my trip.

Toward the end of their visit we were sitting on the sidewalk terrace of some cafe talking about the trip and they said they felt different having come. To have a great time and go back changed - that's all you can ask from a trip to Europe.

The morning of their departure from Madrid I woke up early to make sure they got off alright. These were special companions, but goodbye was the same. I was alone again. I had ten days or so left in Spain and was headed south. Andalucia, a final surfeit of loveliness from a country that offers the traveler everything. But in a way, I was looking past it. Europe, and with it the first half of my trip, was ending. I was headed to the former colonies, to my own hemisphere and the route that would take me home. I was headed to Argentina.