On the Road Again

by Marie-Louise Gay

  “Something new happens here all the time,” I told him.

  “Sure,” my brother chimed in. “Yesterday I found a snail under the living-room sofa.”

  As usual, my parents didn’t listen to me. They hadn’t listened when they’d planned this trip. And now, when I was finally feeling comfortable here, and actually liking it a little, I had to leave again.

  So off we went. At first things weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. In Europe the countries are really close together. You can drive for a couple of hours, and the language, the food, the buildings and the landscape change completely. Unfortunately, everything went a little more slowly in our car. It gasped going uphill, and rattled going down. Even the donkeys went faster than us as we headed toward our destination. Spain, and the city of Barcelona.

  Barcelona is a pretty weird-looking place. That’s because of this architect named Antoni Gaudí. The strange buildings he designed are all over the city. Some of them are crooked, and others are wavy. Some have all sorts of colorful columns and ceramic chimneys on the roofs, which is odd, since you can’t see the roof from the street.

  “Why is everything so crooked here?” asked my brother. “Was there an earthquake or something?”

  “This Gaudí guy built his buildings before rulers were invented,” I told him.

  And he actually believed me!

  We went to Güell Park that sits on a hill above the city. Gaudí designed the park, so of course it was full of curly-cue ceramic sculptures and railings that squirmed and slithered like snakes. There wasn’t a straight line in the whole place.

  My brother sat down on a bench. Not only did it have two humps like a camel, it was covered with tiny square tiles, all of them different colors, that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “I don’t like Gaudí’s stuff,” he said.

  “Why not?” my mother asked.

  “It makes me dizzy. And it looks like somebody’s guts.”

  My brother had a point. But I think Gaudí was brave to invent buildings that were so different from everything else. People must have laughed at him at the time.

  After the park, we went to see his famous church, La Sagrada Familia. Unfortunately, Señor Gaudí never got around to completing it. And now people come from all over the world to see this half-built building and marvel over it, even though it’s still unfinished. I don’t get it. Imagine if I didn’t finish my homework. Nobody would marvel over that!

  Even though Barcelona is in Spain, people don’t speak Spanish there. They speak Catalán, a language that looks a little like Spanish, but doesn’t sound anything like it. They’ve taken most of the vowels out of Spanish and replaced them with consonants.

  Catalán would be a great language for Scrabble. That’s because of all the X’s. As in xocolata. (Hint: you pronounce the “x” as if it were a “sh.”) You could tally up some really big scores with words like that, though you’d have to have more X’s in your game.

  After we had our fill of Gaudí, we went to the Dali Museum just outside Barcelona. Salvador Dali is an artist who’s famous for painting melting watches and some really weird landscapes. According to my mother, all artists have their own vision of the world, which changes the way we see things.

  If that’s true, my mom’s vision of the world must be pretty weird, too. In some of her drawings, cats can fly and rabbits ride bicycles. I’ve never seen that happen, any more than I’ve seen melting watches.

  But I’m keeping my eyes open.

  The Dali museum was completely crazy inside and out. It looked like a huge pink castle with croissants growing out of the walls and gigantic eggs perched along the edge of the roof. I imagined one of those eggs falling and landing on us. The headlines would read, “Canadian Family Squished by Giant Egg.”

  That sure would change my vision of the world!

  After Barcelona, my parents decided to go to Andalucia, in the very south of Spain. I was ready to go back to Celeriac. I missed my friends already. Most of all, I was tired of traveling in our beat-up sardine can of a car.

  “We’ll go to Grenada, and we’ll see the Alhambra,” my father explained enthusiastically as we squeezed back into the car. “It’s one of the wonders of the world.”

  If you ask me, a wonder of the world is something natural, like the Grand Canyon, and not just another ruined castle. Anyway, I’ve never understood what my parents see in ruins. Ruined castles, ruined forts, ruined villages. My parents think that if a building is in good shape, it’s not worth seeing.

  Spain, it turned out, was an enormous country. As the hours went by, my brother and I discovered that we had less and less room in the car.

  Naturally, I had to push him a little to get more space for myself. And, naturally, he pushed me back.

  Then I accidentally sat on his penguin, and he started screaming. My father yelled at both of us. My mother got mad at my father for yelling. My brother blamed me for starting the whole thing. Then I blamed him. Then my father yelled again…

  If we were in a comic strip, you would see an old, beat-up car bouncing along a narrow road with smoke coming out of it and a huge balloon hanging over the roof, like this:

  Meanwhile, the countryside rolled by. Olive trees, red ground, and boring hills stretching on forever.

  “We’re in La Mancha now,” my mother said happily, as if that meant something to us. “The home of Don Quixote.”

  “Don who?” my brother asked.

  To keep us from fighting, my mother told us the story of Don Quixote, who was a knight in this book by Cervantes, a Spanish writer. The problem with Mr. Quixote was that he was always getting things wrong. He thought that windmills were monsters, and that his old mule was a noble stallion, and that his girlfriend, who was pretty ordinary, was a beautiful princess. Luckily he had a best friend, Sancho Panza, who looked after him.

  “I want to read that book,” my little brother said.

  “When you’re older,” my father answered. “It’s pretty long. Hundreds and hundreds of pages, actually.”

  “In the meantime, you can just look at the pictures,” I told him.

  My brother pushed me. And of course I had to push him back, a little harder. Soon we forgot all about Don Quixote, the knight with the sad face. My father tried to break up our fight while keeping one hand on the wheel. My mother yelled at him to keep his eyes on the road.

  A typical family trip!

  To give everyone a break, we stopped to visit a troglodyte village. Troglodyte, I learned from the guidebook, means someone who lives in a cave, which my father said he would love to do right now, so at least he would have some peace and quiet.

  Anyway, in this little town, a long time ago, people moved into caves that the wind and water had hollowed out of the side of a cliff. They are still living there today. They built walls and put in doors and windows.

  At first I thought we would see some cavemen. You know, small, hairy people with big jaws and arms hanging down to the ground. But these troglodytes seemed pretty normal. Their caves were modern, with satellite dishes sticking out at all angles from the cliff. That’s evolution for you!

  Finally, we arrived in the city of Grenada. The problem with that place is that it’s up in the mountains, and it got colder and colder as we slowly climbed from the plains up to the city, with our old car huffing and puffing.

  Once we got there, for some strange reason my parents decided that we needed to save money. That’s the way they are sometimes. They suddenly decide we’re poor, and that we have to squeeze every penny. Usually that happens when we’ve been traveling for a while.

  The way to save money, according to them, was to spend the night in the cheapest, most rundown hotel in the city: La casa de la cucaracha.

  That’s a joke, of course. Nobody would call their place “The Roach Ho
use.” The real name of the hotel was El Dorado, which means “The City of Gold.” That must have been the owner’s idea of a joke.

  We went inside to have a look.

  “It’s so charming,” my mother said, admiring the cold marble staircase. “And so authentic.”

  “Look, all the rooms have a garden view,” my father added, pointing to the courtyard full of frozen plants.

  “Too bad it’s winter,” I reminded them.

  Maybe my parents thought that a freezing-cold hotel with no heat was charming, but I didn’t. All the rooms faced onto an inner patio that was open to the sky, which allowed the cold wind to enter more easily.

  “Look!” I said. “We can see the charming patio right through the door.”

  That’s because it had a hole in it the size of a baseball.

  “The door doesn’t even lock,” my brother said suspiciously. He must have been worried that someone would steal his penguin.

  No matter how we protested, our parents wouldn’t listen. We were doomed to spend the night in the Spanish version of the Ice Hotel.

  We were hungry, of course, after a tiring day of fighting in the car. The problem with Spain is that the restaurants don’t serve dinner until ten o’clock at night. It’s a pretty cruel practice, if you ask me. You could starve to death just waiting for dinner, if you didn’t fall asleep first.

  Tapas to the rescue!

  The same people who came up with the crazy idea of waiting until the middle of the night to eat dinner also invented tapas. They’re the things you eat at normal dinner time while you’re waiting for ten o’clock to roll around. Makes sense, right?

  Tapas are little snacks that are served in all the restaurants and cafés. If you eat enough of them, it’s just like dinner.

  A lot of people were eating them standing up at the counter, as if they were too much in a hurry to sit down. Not us. We came across a place called El Paraíso del Jamón – The Paradise of Ham. It’s not that I’m so crazy about ham, but I wanted to go there. That’s because I saw the fireplace. And sure enough, there was a free table right next to it. By that time I was so cold I was just about ready to sit in the fireplace.

  We went up to the counter to order. My mother ordered the conejo with the caracoles. I couldn’t believe it. Who would have thought of putting rabbit and snails together in the same dish? But that’s exactly what my mother wanted.

  My father figured he should outdo her and order something even stranger. So he asked for black rice.

  “Why is it black?” my brother wanted to know.

  “It’s squid ink,” I told him. “The squids squirt their ink onto the rice.”

  “That’s gross!” he shouted.

  All he would eat was what he called “the brave potatoes.” Those were the patatas bravas, which was just an ordinary potato salad.

  I wanted something really weird to eat, too. So I went for the smoked eels. On the way to Grenada, we’d stopped by a marsh for a picnic, and we saw thousands of them wriggling in the shallow, muddy water. They looked like big greasy snakes having a mud-wrestling match.

  My brother swore he’d rather die than eat them, and here they were, on the menu.

  “You’re ordering that on purpose,” he accused me.

  Maybe he was right.

  I held up a long strip of smoked eel and dropped it into my mouth. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t look at me. The eel tasted, well… smoky. And a little bit eely, too.

  I don’t think I would order eel again.

  Meanwhile, Max ate potatoes and bread. By the time we got back to the hotel, he wasn’t feeling that well. It wasn’t the potatoes. He had a fever. My mother bundled him up and put him to bed. Meanwhile, my father and I went downstairs to beg for a heater for the room my brother and I shared.

  “Por favór,” said my father, smiling the biggest smile he could, and holding his high school Spanish book in his hand. “Queremos una cosa para el calór.”

  Which means, more or less, “Please, we would like a thing for the heat.”

  I wondered what we’d get. A stove? A book of matches? A sweater?

  “Qué quiere?” answered the man at the desk. He wasn’t smiling at all.

  When words fail, try sign language. Which is what my father did. He pouted like a little kid, and put his arms around himself and shivered to show he was freezing. He brushed an imaginary tear from his eye. Then he rubbed his hands together, as if he were trying to warm up.

  I was afraid the man at the desk would think he wanted to start a fire in the room by rubbing two sticks together.

  Meanwhile, I went and sat in the darkest corner of the lobby and flipped through a magazine. I pretended very hard that a) I could read Spanish perfectly, and b) that man was not my father.

  Finally, Señor Dorado exclaimed, “You want hot!”

  “Yes!” my father yelled in return, as if together, he and Señor Dorado had just won the world charades championship.

  Señor Dorado disappeared into a back room behind his desk. A minute later he returned and handed my father the world’s smallest radiator. My dad proudly marched up the four flights of cold marble stairs and into my brother’s room, where he plugged in the machine.

  “See?” my father said triumphantly as the little metal coils started to turn red. “All the modern comforts!”

  Then the three of us tramped out of the room and left my brother snoring under a mountain of sweaters.

  We went back to my parents’ room. There, “all the modern comforts” included a single bare bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. My mother sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed to read, while my father and I went into the bathroom where the other lightbulb hung. I got to read sitting on the toilet, with the seat down, of course. My father read perched on the edge of the tub.

  I was glad I had Robinson Crusoe with me. I sure needed to be somewhere else!

  Everything was quiet in our little library until my mother saw the cockroaches running along the ceiling right above her head.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting!” she shrieked.

  Then her voice became extremely calm and determined. She turned to me and said, “Go and see how your brother is doing.”

  “He’s sleeping,” I said. “He’s all right.”

  “Go make sure he’s warm enough.”

  I knew that tone of voice. It was her your-father-and-I-need-to-talk voice.

  And guess what? The next night we stayed in a four-star hotel in the most modern part of town. There was plenty of heat, and not a cucaracha in sight. Not to mention the super-satellite TV we had in our room. We watched the Simpsons in French, motorcycle racing in English and a soccer game in Spanish.

  I guess we saved enough money on our first night in the Ice Hotel to afford this place.

  Oh, I almost forgot. We did end up seeing the Alhambra, the castle that my parents thought was one of the wonders of the world. It wasn’t in ruins after all. It was a giant castle built on top of a hill, and it was made out of red stone that glowed at sunset. The best part were the gardens. They were full of fountains and pools with the biggest goldfish I had ever seen. Now this would be a great fishing spot – almost too easy! I couldn’t wait to tell Rachid and Ahmed about the size of the fish.

  There are about a million rooms in the Alhambra, and my parents of course wanted to visit all of them. But my brother finally figured out how to get them to leave. He managed to fall into one of the goldfish pools. My father had to fish him out, and he got soaked in the process. Meanwhile, my mother turned bright red.

  “I really think it’s time to go home, right now!” she declared.

  By “home,” she meant Celeriac. And I totally agreed!

  EIGHT

  Encounters of the wooly kind

  The year was going by real
ly fast. Already it was spring. I knew I had to make the most of the time that was left.

  One of the big spring events around Celeriac is the Fête de la Transhumance. A transhumance is like a giant moving day for sheep. Every spring, the sheep all pack up and move to the mountains where it’s cooler, and where the grass is greener and tastier.

  Of course, they don’t do this all by themselves. They have human beings to help them. And those humans think the move is an excellent excuse to have a party.

  So one weekend we headed into the mountains in our sardine can on wheels, in search of the party. The mountain roads were steep and winding, and soon my brother started to turn green. I was half-green myself. Our car’s engine was barely powerful enough to get us up the hills, and the brakes were just strong enough to keep us from flying over the edge of some cliff because, of course, the narrow country roads don’t have guard rails.

  “I don’t feel so good,” my brother complained.

  “We’re almost there,” my father said, trying to sound cheerful.

  Almost where? I wondered. We were on a mountain ridge, and though I could see a really long way, there wasn’t a village in sight.

  We started up another steep hill. I could hear the motor working hard, like in The Little Engine that Could.

  “Maybe I could get out and push,” I suggested.

  “My stomach hurts,” my brother complained some more.

  “Don’t you think we should stop?” my mother said to my father.

  “We can’t, not on a hill like this. We’d roll all the way back down.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  Finally we finished climbing the hill and came to a wide plateau. Le Plateau de Pisse-Mouton, the sign read. The Sheep-Pee Plateau — they really know how to name places in France!

  “This looks like a good place to stop,” my mother said happily.

  Not that we had any choice. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we were surrounded by an army of sheep. We had driven right into their moving day. And they weren’t following the road. They were going cross-country.