Spanien

In February 2020 Pemulis and family -- Joelle, Helga, and Heinrich -- went to Spain. Just as the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) was ramping up its path of destruction, Pemulis and Co. attempted to escape said path by traveling to beautiful Andalusia and try to if at all possible reduce some of their daily stresses.

TL;DR: sort of worked, sort of didn't.

One nice thing about living in the general environs of the geographical centre of Europe is that it's fairly easy and relatively inexpensive to get to all sorts of nice places. That includes, of course, the region of Andalusia, and following a 2.5 hour uneventful-ish flight originating from Franz Josef Strauss we touched down in the wonderful city of Málaga (or, as is the case with nearly all airports, just outside of the city). It was here that we picked up our trusty Peugeot, hoped that I installed the child seats at least relatively correctly, and asked Siri to guide us up into the mountains around Ernest Hemingway's favourite Spanish city, Ronda.

We arrived at our temporary home in the hills north of Ronda just before nightfall. As is always the case, we were in a rush to get our children fed so that they might become a little less whiney and difficult, and then get them to bed. While generally much appreciated, the 4-course meal probably wasn't the best thing to be placed on the agenda for this particular evening, but the food was good and no one left the hotel due to our children ruining their expensive romantic dinner (that we know of).

Despite being exhausted, it took the usual 8 hours to get Heinrich to sleep which -- if you're doing the math at home -- means that we didn't sleep at all. But that's nothing out of the ordinary so the following morning our somehow-used-to-not-getting-any-sleep-at-all bodies managed to get everyone dressed and to breakfast before everything was dismantled for the day. Three aspects of Spanish culture that really align with my worldview / life philosophy / whatever you want to call it, are: (1) late meals; (2) taking forever to do anything; and (3) sleeping all afternoon (aka the famous "siesta"). Unfortunately, each one of those aspects -- which I can't stress enough attune with my vibe, so to say, just perfectly -- are 100% diametrically opposed to how a child lives his or her life (especially our children). Perhaps "taking forever to do anything" fits quite nicely with some of Helga's predispositions such as her affinity to requiring 45 minutes to take even the first bite of a single piece of toast before leaving for Kindergarten in a mad rush. But things like waiting for food to come and staying in your seat or remaining somewhat quiet are so completely foreign to her that one would think me and my daughter consist of entirely different species. Let's not even think about the possibility of having a siesta...

One very nice thing about our hotel and that matched point (1) above (late meals) is that we had a nice setup whereby the chef would whip up some pasta around 6:30, Helga and Heinrich would (mostly) eat it, we'd put them to bed, and then head back to the dining room around 9:00 for the "real" dinner. We actually pulled this off on 4 out of 7 nights which is pretty impressive. You've already read about the first night where we arrived to the hotel at the actual dinner time anyways so we all ate together. The two other nights where a romantic adult dinner did not work out were on non-consecutive evenings where each of us suffered some kind of stomach bug. But every single other night the kids went to sleep, we walked down to the dining room, ate a long drawn-out dinner with very good wine from the region, and returned to the room without any major disasters having occurred. Not bad!

Because we stayed in a somewhat mountainous region, we were excited to get in some training runs for our quickly approaching 64 km ultra trail race in the Alps. That didn't exactly work out as we hoped it might, but we did manage to do a little bit of running/hiking and rather than actually getting any training in, the main thing that these few outings accomplished was showing us that we are completely and woefully unprepared for this upcoming event and there's basically no way that we will be because who has time / possibility to go to the mountains and run for 6 hours when you have two small children? Kind of a dumb mistake on our part but I've made worse mistakes in my life, so...

Above you'll see my longest run of the trip which was still only 10 km. I managed to get some "climbing" in but if you can read the contour lines in the picture it was only about 400 m elevation change at most. But that tiny amount destroyed my legs for the entirety of the vacation and it was only 10 km and at most 400 m up. The race (in about 100 days from now) is 64 km through the Alps with 5000 m of climbing. Shiiiiit as they say.

Anyways, other parts of our trip were also nice. The food in Spain is very good and not very expensive. It was sunny every day and around 20 degrees. One day we met up with a friend and his daughter who live in Málaga in a nearby town -- Setenil de Las Bodegas -- which is famous for many of the buildings being built right into the side of the rocky mountain. It's pretty cool...

Another day we drove into Ronda proper, walked on the famous bridge, visited the famous palace (at least the outside of it), and of course ate some pizza. Throughout all this I'm glossing over the fact that it was never all that relaxing because Helga was always doing something like trying to run away or have a screaming fit in the street or jump into oncoming traffic or refusing to eat what she ordered or spilling food all over herself and into her hair or Heinrich was crying because he was tired or hungry or needed to be changed or whatever. But throughout it all we never had to actually make any food or clean any dishes so in that sense things were somehow maybe somewhat easier than at home. It didn't necessarily feel like it at the time though... Strange...

All in all: 9/10. Nice place, good weather, great food, not enough to keep kids occupied.