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It wasn’t just the heat - we were melting down in every sense of the word. You could say we hit the traveling wall as soon as we got to Rome. The Aperal Spritzer that had been flowing through my veins 24 hours earlier had been replaced by the fight or flight instinct that undoubtedly still figures largely in the collective mindset of this place - home to the gruesome gladiatorial battles of the Colosseum. So, cheers, I guess to the city for keeping it real.
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Tuscany is slow but incredibly not boring. We were worried 7 days in the Italian countryside would be a little much. I worried about the kids wanting to be on their ipads the whole time and just bored to tears by the extraordinary rustic beauty and sense of peace we adults long to experience.
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After crazy jet lag and the news of what happened in Nice, Vernazza was a place whose beauty almost seemed obnoxious and sarcastic. Either that or we were just beyond turned in to the beauty of life after all the reports of horror.
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I hate when I catch myself thinking “we were just there” or essentially “it could have been us.” We were walking on the same streets that a madman was doing recon on and would, a day later, massacre what is now 84 people.
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After a couple of intensely jet lagged days in nice, we took the party on the road…or the train as it were. Somehow we pumped up the kids and got them ready to wake up at 08:30. We went to bed at 12am and were up for a couple of hours of french TV - an opera about Cleopatra who’s costume captivated us all and ignited a is-it-her-real-boob-or-a transparent-fabric-with-painted-nipple debate. Needless to say, with less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep, the next day wasn’t looking so good for us. We tried not to think of the Britney circa 2007 style meltdowns leading to late arrivals that might await our day. But, to our surprise, the kids totally rallied and pulled off a marathon day of train travel with two exchanges, no lost luggage and a totally reasonable amount of tears.
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It’s a good thing people stay out late here cause we are sleeping right on through this day. We arrived in Nice late last night and while Jeremy and I were ready to sleep our kids were, lets just say…not.
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Santa Barbara is a pretty magical place. Not like unicorn magical but magical because I’m not sure there is one word that can accurately describe it - so I went with magical. When you mention Santa Barbara to people you almost always get back a happy sigh or that look on the face that happens when you reminisce about a place that made you feel different than other places do. Not because of who you were with or what you did necessarily, but the energy that place infused you with. So in that sense, it is magical. BOOM! There are so many things - natural beauty, cultures, restaurants, wine bars, people and parades. There is a lot to love. What we love the most however, are our friends, our old neighborhood and all the places we used to go and things we used to do when we lived there.
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It was a really challenging (first world challenging) year for our family. After living in Santa Barbara and building a life there on our own we made the very difficult decision to leave and move back to our home town of Newport Beach (I said it was a first world type of challenging). The decision came on the heels of what can only be described as a complete shit storm of family “happenings”. Sometimes it felt like I was watching one of those independent films that, while you appreciate the gut wrenching performances of say, Michelle Williams or Ryan Gosling, or the artistic vision of Lars Von Trier, you’d prefer to keep the drama on the silver screen. Changes at work, deaths, divorces, and, I shit you not, a fire. Had it started raining frogs a year and a half ago I surely would have gone for the pint of Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer and high tailed it to the bunker. It was just dramz to the max. And we hate the dramz. And the dramz back at home coincided with our kids totally finding their groove in Santa Barbara and making what we can only hope will be life - long buddies. It was a groove that took a while too. So to tear them away from that weighed really heavily on the heart.