Yesterday was bad. There isn’t any other way to cut it. What’s interesting about it is as I look back at my brief notes from the day, wrote down several positive things at the start:
Overwhelmed with gratitude on how the words are coming to me when I need to speak. Asked the woman how to open the door.
Prayer to find the keys— ‘llaves.’ Could have been in one of any 4 bags or 4 backpacks, let alone possibly someone’s pocket.
I’m grateful for mistakes at the beginning. Throw up, poop and peed pants all in the first 3 days— fortunately none in the car or plane. We were prepared.
How hard it was to see these blessings when difficult stuff got really thick…
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Packing up luggage for 8 people is hard work. Despite my careful packing, Saturday morning all 4 suitcases and 4 backpacks were over spilling over with electronics, clothes, shoes, food, and the most random stuff. I said to Mike, “We need to make a catalog of everything in each bag. With a little sleep deprivation, and just the massive amount of stuff that we had, there was no way to remember ( recuerda) where something was in the moment we needed it. With the effort of everyone, we got all of our bags and people down to the parking garage and into our 9 passenger van by noon, 2 hours later than we had hoped.
The last thing to do was to return the keys to the apartment. ¨Do you have them?” I asked Mike. ¨Just one set.¨ He said. I looked at all of our bags already loaded. They could be anywhere. And with a special electronic door sensor, we assumed a substantial fee would come with it not being returned. I searched quickly in several spots I thought it may be likely to have been placed. I looked hopelessly at Mike. ¨We need to pray,¨ I said. At that point, gathered around the back of our van, we prayed as a family. Right once the prayer was said, I looked in the pocket of one of the bags, and there were the keys.
It was then I was grateful for a God who is mindful of me and answers to prayers. It was then I had a confirmation that despite difficult challenges, he is watching over us.
The next stop was Avila, about an hour and a half away. It is a city with a fully intact castle-like Roman wall, and when we first set sights on it, it was very impressive. Mike drove us up to the entrance going into the walled part of the city, but was quickly told by a police officer that we couldn´t park there. He went to find a spot that ended up being a 15 minute walk away. The area was bustling with tourists and buses. While we waited, we successfully dealt with James throwing up from getting car sick, and peeing his pants. It made me feel better about our packing considering I had everything that we needed to remedy the situation accessible and on us.
We began to search out the entrance to go to the top of the wall to walk the perimeter. With the twins set to get out of the stroller, we decided to try out two child ´leashes’ we had ordered before the trip. They secured well on both parent and child´s wrists and connected with a plastic covered cord that stretched with a slinky shape ( much like a cord for a bike lock).
Makayla had one twin and I had the other when we walked up the steps to the entrance and Mike took the elevator to bring up the stroller. While Mike visited with the admittance attendant about what to do with the stroller while seeing the wall, Ava pressed the button to the elevator and went inside. Makayla, with her wrist strapped to the cord pulled by Ava, rushed to try to get her to come out, but only after Ava had pressed the button for the elevator to come down. The doors began to close and Makayla tried to put her arm in the elevator door to stop it, but it was too late. I looked across the room horrified to see Ava closed behind the elevator doors attached to a strong cord that was tied to the outside of elevator. Immediately my mind went to the worst. I couldn’t do anything. Just moments later, the door opened on its own, but it rattled me so much. I reassigned leash holding to parents only.
I started to think about the warning I would write in a review on Amazon about these contraptions. But once we got to the wall, they were much better than the alternative of trying to keep the twins curious feet from walking near ledges and unguarded stairwells, so we kept the twins ón leash. At the end we snapped a few photos without them and then I told Mike to have one of the kids help him take the stroller down the stairs and we could bring the babies down. Unfortunately, the ´we´ pronoun was not specific enough.
As I followed after Ava attempting one more climb unleashed, all of the sudden I heard Makayla shout, ¨Mom, Edith!¨ I grabbed Ava and scurried around the rock walled corner to see Edith scaling up a flight of stone steps with an open side and no railing and now at the top of a higher level! Jenny, Audrey and Mike were at the lower level completely unaware. I ran up to get her and came down to find Mike and family to address the situation. From that point forward, we needed to go one adult for every child. It was too risky to assume we all had each other just in the group. That and I would google ´child friendly´ and the name of every future site we planned to visit.
Shot nerves, three hours of asleep the night before, and then a three-hour car ride ending with 20 minutes of searching for our hotel is a recipe for a a completely losing it. I kept myself pulled together the best I could as we were going to meet a man Mike had baptized 20 years ago and his family that evening. Unfortunately, to add to the situation, I had felt a little sore about the trip to that night in Guadalajara even prior to arriving there. I had looked at our schedule a couple of weeks beforehand and realized that we had really packed too much into our first few days. Everything that I had read said that the first day would be pretty much absorbed by jet lag recovery, and that would only give us 1 full day in Segovia, with many historic sites, plus friends Mike was hoping to see. I had asked him about pushing the visit to see Valentine and his family until the end of the trip, but he was pretty adamant about the importance of it and worrying we wouldn’t get to it on our last days.
Exactly what I thought would happen did. We had gotten there much later than expected and now I was trying to figure out logistics of feeding the kids when restaurants don’t open until 8 for dinner. The car that got parked away in a garage with cribs and half of the necessary bags that should have gotten unloaded, and showing up with my ´happy wife face´ after having an already draining day. I put on my best Spanish, popped a green tea pill with caffeine, and tried to stay positive as we drove 30 minutes to go to Burger King with the parents and their kids (which is really not my thing, but it seems to be more popular here than in the US!)
Still, the experience was very sweet. Valentine told us about how Mike had essentially saved his life. When he met them, Mike and his companion and been fasting every Friday for the last 2 months to find someone to teach. Valentine came up to talk to them when he was drunk— at 10 am. The doctors had given him 2 years to live because liver disease from his alcoholism, and his wife had separated from him. Mike had watched over him for months while they were teaching him, always knowing when to call or stop by when he was planning to go back to the bar. Now we were here eating with his wife and 3 of the 7 children they have together, and he has been faithfully going to church for 20 years. He showed us a picture he kept of Mike— told us kept it in his wallet next to his heart for 20 years. I could tell it meant so much to him.
While we drove back, I was wasted. I had heard Mike and Valentine talking about going to church in the morning and the driving distance. It was daylight savings time for Spain this weekend and we would be losing an hour.
We got out of the car and I laid it onon Mike, ¨We can´t do it.¨I said. “I´m exhausted. The babies didn´t nap today. We can´t pack up and check out of our hotel to drive 30 minutes to a church meeting that starts at 9 am tomorrow. This is why I had counseled with you about this. You didn´t listen. I even brought it up a few days ago when you had booked the hotel here— which was $100 more than the average nightly price we had paid in Spain because a soccer tournament was there that weekend. I had said again, I thought we were packing in too much at the begining of this trip. I really don´t want to ruin this special night and this experience with Valentine, but going to church tomorrow, having lunch with them, and then driving 5 hours to Córdoba is just too much. I wish you would listen, rather than just forge forward without considering my thoughts.¨ All this was compounded by feelings that he had not checked the details of parking, drive times, and locations that I had asked him to check into before.
My head dropped on the pillow with Mike saying, ¨I don´t think it is fair to be making me out as the villain. How can we salvage this trip.¨ I pulled my eye mask over my eyes and shoved my earplugs in. I needed to sleep.