For the last year my sister and I have thought what a neat thing it would be to go back to the exact places that we visited on our first trip to Europe with our mother 50 years ago. I am not exactly certain how this trip idea started but the one thing that I am certain of is that it centered around a lively food discussion. Somehow all of life's most interesting memories seem always to involve food. So the idea of retracing our first trip sounded like a interesting idea.
My sister and I take an annual trip to France together and we have done that forever but this trip was going to start in Madrid and then would end in Paris which always feels as comfortable to us as an broken in old pair of shoes. We planned on two things happening: first, that it would jar both our memories on long forgotten details that some how through the planning stage seemed important and second, returning to somewhere that you are not totally familiar with is a good thing to do when you are over fifty.
We vowed that we will now travel each year to an unknown place together as a healthy thing to keep mentally nimble (and it sure beats learning Chinese or doing crossword puzzles.) The unknown, the piecing together and non-predictable is a healthy silent partner as we all age.
For the last year my sister and I have thought what a neat thing it would be to go back to the exact places that we visited on our first trip to Europe with our mother 50 years ago. I am not exactly certain how this trip idea started but the one thing that I am certain of is that it centered around a lively food discussion. Somehow all of life's most interesting memories seem always to involve food. So the idea of retracing our first trip sounded like a interesting idea.
My sister and I take an annual trip to France together and we have done that forever but this trip was going to start in Madrid and then would end in Paris which always feels as comfortable to us as an broken in old pair of shoes. We planned on two things happening: first, that it would jar both our memories on long forgotten details that some how through the planning stage seemed important and second, returning to somewhere that you are not totally familiar with is a good thing to do when you are over fifty.
We vowed that we will now travel each year to an unknown place together as a healthy thing to keep mentally nimble (and it sure beats learning Chinese or doing crossword puzzles.) The unknown, the piecing together and non-predictable is a healthy silent partner as we all age. Here we were trying to remember the details of what year it could have been, what airline, was it a prop plane, hotel details and what restaurants that we visited. We were going to retrace our route to the best of our recollection but our memory of the trip was a bit foggy and faded as I was 7 and my sister was 11. We decided that we would take 4 days, stay at the same hotel and eat at the two restaurants we remembered most – Casa Botin and the La Barracca and eat as many tapas as time allowed.
Our reservations were made and we were very thrilled to be doing this. Fifty years is a long time to remember the taste of suckling pig melting in your mouth. Would Madrid be as memorable? The answer is simply, yes! The food is magical, the city is beautiful and yes the suckling pork at the Casa Botin is worth the visit but the real gift is that I again enjoyed it with my sister just like we did 50 years ago. We don't have matching outfits anymore and we are very different people but we are matching bookends. We are sisters and that is the treasure we have wherever we are, Madrid or anywhere else. We have had a lot of smooth sailing but we also know how to smooth out the sail's wrinkles. We make sisterhood work because we work at it. We still know how to laugh together and treasure each other's company just like we did in Madrid fifty years ago. Lesson learned again.
Brenda Athanus runs a small gourmet food shop in Belgrade Lakes, Maine with her sister Tanya called the Green Spot.
The Green Spot
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