It’s hard when you write a travel blog not to focus on the good times. It’s the same with most ways we post about our lives, on social media sites, etc. And when you live in Spain and have access to travel as we have, it’s perhaps even easier to make it seem like you haven’t a care in the world.
That of course is not always reality, and so in an effort to Keep It Real, let’s dive into the weekend we just had in London.
In general, I enjoy the city a great deal. My parents took us there over winter break when I was 8 years old, and it was such a powerful experience I can still remember almost everything we did nearly 40 years later – that’s how memorable travel can be.
I’ve been back a handful of times since then; backpacking after graduation with my college buddies, with the Hawks for work one time when we played in an international game there, and as recently as last March when I visited a friend of mine to see an Arsenal game. This trip would be the first time our kids were going, and I wanted to make the most of it.
Spoiler alert: we didn’t.
The trouble began Friday. We’d flown in Thursday for a long weekend, as Hilary had work to do first so we stayed with her at the airport the first night. Friday we found an AirBNB* in a central location that would be our base of operations for the rest of the weekend.
*I should mention the reason we waited so long to book is because originally we were planning to try to fly back to the States for a friend’s bar mitzvah, but when the flights started looking bad we had to change our plan, hence the entire premise of the weekend in London was a back-up plan from the get-go. Not a bad back-up plan, but a back-up nonetheless.
When we arrived at the property, let’s just say the family was underwhelmed. It’s been long established that I am fine staying wherever and will almost always look for cheap accommodations, but this place had good reviews and seemed as fine as anywhere else in our budget.
No one else agreed with me. At first glance, they had reason to be suspicious. It was a small apartment, and clearly had seen better days. There were visible water stains on the ceiling, chipped paint along the floorboards, and very little in the way of charm. But it wasn’t dirty, it had room for the four of us (granted, a queen bed in the single bedroom and a small sofa that pulled out for the boys to sleep on), and we were only going to be there to go to sleep, so as far as I was concerned, we were good to go.
After we dropped our stuff off and headed into town, the complaining commenced. Neither child wanted to stay at the AirBNB. Hilary, to her credit, most certainly didn’t want to either, but knew we needed to maintain a unified front.
Intermittently throughout the day, when they had a moment to think about it, they whined about not wanting to stay there. We’d be having a good time walking down the street, or eating lunch at Wagamama (marking the 5th country we’ve eaten at that fine asian-fusion establishment), and then the second we finished they’d all of a sudden remember the looming threat of a subpar AirBNB and resume their protestations. It was a delight! (Narrator: It was not a delight)
Friday night we got tickets to go see Hamilton. We’d never seen the play before (we were supposed to see it in April 2020, but something kept us from doing that, can’t remember what), and getting to see it in London, in a theater founded in 1911, was a real highlight.
Everyone had an amazing time, a truly memorable experience. And the second it ended and we walked outside both boys began melting down, creating their own aftershow for all the patrons. To borrow a phrase from the show we’d just seen, they all got to be on the sidewalk where it happened. At that point it was mostly amusing, watching our children wail in near harmonic unison, and we both couldn’t help but laugh at the situation unfolding, which as you can probably guess, helped very little in containing it.
After about 10-15 minutes, Jamie began to settle and recognize the futility of his actions, but Emmett was pretty far gone. We got him to calm down enough to get in a taxi to take us to our apartment, and the second we exited he immediately dove headfirst back into his tantrum.
This time it was decidedly less amusing, and really had us flipping through the mental pages of all the parenting books and advice we’ve taken in over the years, desperately searching for an answer.
It’s at times like these that I really wonder about the state of parenting today, and whether what we are doing is better, worse, or neutral from how we were raised.
When either of our children has a meltdown, we try very hard to lead with empathy, to recognize that for the most part they cannot help how they are feeling nor can they control it. We try to provide support, via hugs, via soothing, by telling them it’s okay to feel how they are feeling, by encouraging them to breathe. That is not how it was handled when I was a child. I’m not saying it was handled poorly, just differently. My grandmother was VERY quick to discourage crying, for example, and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to suggest my dad also has a very short leash for it as well.
I am fine with tears, but I am also very stubborn in placing a firm boundary that whining/crying/complaining will not lead to the result they want, and in this particular situation, we weren’t leaving this AirBNB. For one thing, it was 11 pm at night and we weren’t going to gather all our stuff and try to go find a hotel at that late hour (especially given how tired everyone was), and second, and more importantly to me, this felt very much like some entitled shit, which triggers me big time.
We are on an amazing family adventure, and I am very aware of the privilege we have to be doing so, especially during these turbulent times.
It is so important to me to try to keep our kids grounded and grateful for what we have, and throwing a hissy fit because our housing is not up to five-star quality reeks of being unappreciative. All of which are things I desperately want to explain to Emmett, but mid-tantrum is not really an effective time to do so, y’know?
Emmett would not set foot inside the apartment, and instead was shrieking in the hallway, so I decided to try to get him to come downstairs with me to go try to find some chargers (Stupid American Tax: we forgot Britain uses a completely different outlet set up and left all our multi-faceted chargers at home). We got about five feet outside the door before the waterworks unleashed again, and I stood with him on a dark street corner for 25+ minutes trying alternately to console him, to prod him, and to firmly state that however long he was going to take to get through this, it was still going to end with us sleeping in the same place.
At some point he finally gave up, which is to say I at least got him to come inside the building and go into the apartment, where he promptly started up again. I’ve never seen him as distraught as he was, and I just didn’t know what to do. I offered to sleep on the couch bed with Jamie and let him sleep in the bed with Hilary to see if that calmed him, which it half did, then I ended up getting in the bed as well to help soothe him, and then he finally – FINALLY – went to sleep, somewhere around two hours after the whole thing began when we walked out of Hamilton.
Naturally, the next morning he was back to his normal self, and with his first words of the morning, said cheerfully and simply, “I think I was just tired.” OH YOU THINK DO YOU?
One of the hardest things about parenting, for me at least, is what to do in moments just like those, when the child shows no scars whatsoever from the catastrophe you just experienced and is perfectly ready to move forward, but you are still feeling the weight of it around your head like a millstone. I was worse for the wear, but trying to regroup for a fun day ahead, highlighted by taking the boys to their first Premier League soccer match at historic Craven Cottage for a tout between Fulham and Aston Villa. Or at least, that was the plan, but it didn’t come to fruition, and if I had to trace the root cause to its origin, it’s all because I hosted a Super Bowl party for Jamie and his flag football team. Say huh?
See, with us being six hours ahead in Spain, there was no way we were going to be able to watch it live, so we invited Jamie’s team over to watch it on DVR Monday after school. That meant, if I wanted to watch it without knowing what happened, I’d have to go the entire day in a state of information reclusivity. I’ve been burned trying to avoid sports scores in so many different ways, and this time I was determined to stay out of the know. I turned on the do not disturb feature on my phone to avoid untimely notifications, and that is where my problem began.
I’d told my friend Chris, a Brit who used to work in the Premier League (and who I’d previously gone to the aforementioned Arsenal game), that we were coming in, and being the decent fellow he is, he took it upon himself to see if he could scrounge up some tickets for us, which it turns out he was able to – on Monday. He wrote to ask me what I needed, but I never saw his messages, and so he decided to roll the dice and purchase a pair for the game, thinking it was only me and Emmett since it was his birthday weekend.
Had I seen his messages, I could have cleared it all up right then and there, but I didn’t, and so we only had two tickets to a game that I needed three (or four) for. I’d promised Hilary she could have the afternoon to herself while I took the boys to the game, so I figured no sweat, we’d just go down to the grounds early and find a single ticket from a scalper somewhere along the line.
The game started at 3, so we arrived around 1 to give ourselves time to sort the ticket out and then enjoy the ambiance of game day. I first went to an ATM to draw cash so I could buy a ticket, and that’s when things really started careening off track.
Sidenote – living in a highly digital world has many, many upsides, but every now and again there are reminders that the old ways of doing things had their merits as well.
At the ATM I dipped into the cardholder on my phone case to grab my debit card, only to realize I didn’t have it with me. This seems like an obvious oversight, but in Spain I don’t need to use a physical card, I can just log onto the app and it sends me a numeric code that allows me to withdraw money. Technology! This apparently didn’t transfer to foreign banks, and so my first big obstacle struck – I had no money to buy a ticket because I use my phone for everything and never have cash anymore.
I stayed calm, and tried to think of other ways I might get money. I went into a variety of stores and pubs up and down the main thoroughfare, hoping I could find a gentle soul who would agree to sell me something at a much higher price point and give me cash, but almost every store we went into was, you guessed it, cashless. The ones that had cash refused, and I get it, it probably seemed shady as fuck, even with me dragging my poor kids into each store hoping for a sympathy payoff.
Okay, I thought to myself, maybe with all this technology, some of the ticketsellers might be willing to take PayPal or Venmo? Have scalpers entered the digital age as well? The answer is, I have no idea, because I never found a single person selling a ticket. Craven Cottage is a tiny venue, and Fulham, like most English clubs, has a wonderful fanbase that attends games religiously.
I alternated back and forth between trying to solve the two main issues – first looking for places I might get cash, then remembering that I needed to find a person with a ticket to sell, then remembering that if they had a ticket I’d probably need cash, on and on in an endless loop until it started getting close to game time.
Finally, it was time to admit our current circumstances and alter the plan. Hilary had said if we couldn’t get a ticket for Jamie she’d come get him, but I really wanted her to have her alone time, so I decided instead to let the boys go to the game and I’d just watch from a nearby pub. I told Hilary to continue as planned.
Just one problem! The tickets were on my phone – TECHNOLOGY! – and because of that once they were in the stadium they’d have no way to show proof of their seats to the ushers if they needed to, and if I gave them my phone, then they’d have no way to contact me if something went awry. It also meant that it would be way more conspicuous that I wasn’t going in with them at the entrance because I’d be scanning just two tickets and then retreating into the background, whereas (at least I think) if they’d had paper tickets we likely could have blended them in with the rest of the crowd going in.
I tried to get them in, but of course they weren’t going to let a 12- and 9-year-old in without supervision. I tried in my most kindly brontosaurus way possible to see if I could get them to let me in with the boys, or find a spare ticket, but it was all for naught.
With the game about to kick off, I gave up and called Hilary to come get Jamie, and Emmett and I would at least get to check out the second half from our seats. Only Hilary didn’t answer, because for some reason both of our phones had issues with service nearly the entire weekend, which is ironic because the company we use for our Spanish SIM cards is a UK-based company! Surely if there’s one other country the phones should work in, that would be the one!
I couldn’t reach Hilary for almost an hour, and by the time we got to her, it was too late. London is a massive city, and if she came to get Jamie the game would likely be over by the time she arrived. I did debate the ethics of leaving a 12-year-old at a bar by himself to wait for his momma, but after only a few seconds decided that was probably not a terrific choice.
The whole ordeal was a debacle wrapped in failure smothered in fiasco sauce. I was so downhearted – it wasn’t just that we didn’t get to go to the game (Stupid American Tax for unused tickets: $120 GBP), it was that we only had a few days in London to begin with and now we’d wasted almost an entire afternoon wandering the same 3-block radius coming up short on several tasks, and all because of TECH-FUCKING-NOLOGY. It’s enough to make you want to go be a hermit in the woods for a few months.
So yeah, the trip did not go according to Hoyle, and the truth is few trips ever do, though usually I think we turn the lemons into better-tasting lemonade.
Okay, this post feels like a bit of a downer, and really we did have a nice time in London even amidst the tantrums and ticketing snafus. So let me end on a high note.
Amidst all of the complaining about technology, two moments stood out to me from the trip, both of which were devoid of any use of our blasted devices.
On Thursday, we had to get up super early to catch a train to Madrid to fly to London, and by the time we got there, we were fairly gassed. The train from the airport into town takes about 45 minutes, and very quickly both boys fell asleep on either side of me, with both of their heads leaning on my shoulders and bobbing back and forth as the train moved and the gravity of sleep took hold. I wanted so badly to get a picture of it, but my arms were incapacitated by their slumbering noggins, so I had no choice but to live in the moment and acknowledge that was all it would ever be, this wonderful little moment of parenthood.
Later that night we were back on the train heading back to the airport, and out of nowhere Jamie started asking me about Pompeii – I think he’d seen a YouTube video about it recently or something. I was trying my best to give him the rundown it as best as I could remember, and while I was telling him about the eruption of Mt. Suvius, I couldn’t help but notice the gentleman sitting across from us nodding his head at every piece of info I related.
As we were nearing our stop, the man began talking to Jamie and told him he was an archaelogist who SPECIALIZES in Pompeii, and that the place is amazing and 100% worth a visit, so I think the fates are telling us we will have to add that to our itinerary.
Maybe this time I’ll take cash.
Open Harts 