The First Day

 

November, 2012

My lovely wife and I were sitting by the pool at the Phoenix Resort in Ambergris Caye, Belize, sipping rum punches and enjoying the view as the Caribbean Sea crashed over the barrier reef about a mile offshore.  Our son, Braeden, was barely 7 months old at the time and had just gone down for a nap.

“You know,” I said, “if you want to live like this full time, we can.”

There was a long pause.

“Ok,” replied my wife.

She loved her job as a high school English teacher and she wouldn’t dream of giving it up.

A long time passed as I considered my next move.

“I’m just saying that if you wanted to retire we could spend all our time together.”

Another long pause.

“We could live pretty much anywhere.  Why stay in the Northeast?”

She thought for a bit.  “I don’t want to leave my job,” she replied carefully.

And I was smart enough to know that that was the end of it.  For now.

July 2016

Fast forward a few years and we are now in Day 2 of our open-ended travels.  We’ve been in Paris for a day and a half.  We’re exhausted, we miss our family and friends, and as Juliann has said, “all we’ve done is sleep and drink wine”, but at this point we wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We flew out of JFK at 11:55 pm on Saturday night, which despite expectations actually turned out to be a good way to travel with a 4-year-old.

[I say this in spite of the fact that said 4-year-old is currently in his bedroom, door closed, actively talking to his Pooh bear.  At 12:34 am.  The jury is actually out, so don’t believe my bullshit.]

Juliann and I slept for a few hours on the flight, and as we were blessed with an empty seat in our 5-seat row, Braeden got to spread out over a few seats and slept almost the entire flight.

[By the way, our hot breakfast on the very French XL Airways was “sugar bread” with a side of bread.  These people have never heard of Paleo.  I’m in big trouble.]

We landed, got our RER tickets after some difficulty, (who designed these SNCF ticket machines, anyway, Jack Sparrow?  They’re terrible) we got to Paris, and checked into our apartment in the Latin Quarter.

It turned out to be a lovely little place complete with a tiny kitchen and a shower in which I have to turn sideways to fit my shoulders, but the critical feature is that it comes with bunkbeds and a stuffed panda and Pooh bear, which means the boy loves it like home.

The very first night found him spooning Pooh bear like Sebastian on the old Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Show, and we couldn’t have been more grateful.

Since then we’ve gotten unpacked and taken a couple of failed attempts at grocery shopping that have ended, predictably in something like:

“This sucks and I’m hungry.”

“I’m thirsty.  You wanna say f**k this and go to a brasserie for some wine and dinner?  But mostly some wine?”

“Are you kidding?  Of course I do!”

And away we go.  Somehow, though, we have some healthy food in the fridge and we’re settling in.

[Boy update:  it’s 12:48 and he’s sweet-talking Pooh bear about something.  Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day.]

Today was a blur.  We had breakfast, did a little shopping, took a spin by Notre Dame because it’s just down the street, and the boy played on the bouncy toys someone miraculously placed just beside Notre Dame because said someone realized that most parents would want a goddamned break by the time they got there and spent just under 90 seconds trying to admire the flying buttresses before their kid started having a total f**king meltdown on the banks of the Seine.

We had lunch and a nap.  A long one.  So long I started to worry that both the boy and Juliann had somehow banged their heads earlier and gotten NFL-style concussions.

We headed out again to try to find some wine and bread, which proved more difficult than one might think in the middle of Paris, probably because we’re temporarily deprived of our phones and have to rely on maps and pens and paper.

[Side note:  how the hell did we ever survive on vacation 15 years ago?  Was it really legal for TripAdvisor and Yelp to not exist in 1999?]

We walked around the incredibly beautiful Jardin du Luxembourg, which is a couple of blocks away from our apartment.  Braeden was delighted that he could finally see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the one landmark he knows in Paris and has been asking about every day for a week.

There’s an amazing playground right in the middle of the park, but it was closed because, well, it was 8 o’clock and you should really have your frigging kid in bed by now so why don’t you quit screwing around and get him tucked in for the night?!?

It ended up being another late day, and Juliann and I wrapped it all up by lounging in our living room, sipping some amazing wine on the couch, and watching the light fade while listening to the sounds coming through the window from Place Sorbonne right around the corner.

It’s been an incredible, exhausting, overwhelming, wonderful start, and we’re grateful to even have gotten this far.  We have a small list of things to do tomorrow, and we’re going to try to relax and enjoy our time together as much as possible.

Until next time…

I’m writing a book! To join the party and follow along as I write, swear, and sweat my way through the next several months, check out the Facebook group for the book!