Vacation

It took swimming in the Mediterranean to remind me that we’re on vacation; I think I’d been turning our trip into too much work. You know, you gotta visit this or that church, see all this here art, make sure you don’t miss some spectacular sight or another, and whatever you do, don’t drink too much or you might overlook something important.

A couple hours of body-surfing in the ocean, though, reminded me that we’re here to have a fun and that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to—except maybe make halting attempts to speak some semblance of a language I don’t understand.

So, I didn’t even beat myself up for spending most of the afternoon in the room yesterday watching the Tour de France on TV; I spread out a blanket on the floor and dozed in air-conditioned comfort while enjoying the spectacle of world-class cyclists attacking a mountain high above the tree line.

Nor was I bothered that we didn’t find the perfect spot for dinner last night; it was enough to wander around, fall into a bar called the “Betty Ford” where Jen and I traded drinks because she liked mine more than hers and I—again, adopting my celebratory spirit—decided not to care.

Finally, in keeping with the theme, we ended the evening doing something probably none of us would have ever done were we not on vacation: standing on a street corner next to a fast-food restaurant where Mimi, her appetite whetted by a night of tromping around behind us and sucking on fruit drawn from the sangria pitcher, ate French fries from a cone, while Jen and I carried on a conversation with a transsexual streetwalker named Luana who spoke excellent English, honed by her years in Canada, and who regaled us with tales of misadventures with immigration authorities and invited us to her home in Portugal should we ever make it there.