At Home, part 28

There were a couple of standard tours we kept ready for our guests. When seeing Segovia we had a regular side trip to Pedraza, a real tourist-pleaser. This tiny mountain town was made up of small rustic houses arranged around narrow streets that led up to a small castle, which had become the private residence of a painter. There were good restaurants for a Sunday lamb lunch, and there were a few shops with attractive crafts, including locally made pewter items like lamps and candlesticks.

Nearly all our guests took a trip to Toledo, with or without us as guides. I had developed a protocol for visiting the town. I always went first to the tiny church of Santo Tomé, which housed my favorite El Greco painting, The Burial of Count Orgaz. The church had just a few benches, so it filled up quickly as the day went on, and it really paid to go early—that way you could sit on the front bench, a yard or two from the painting, for as long as you wanted. I skipped the Alcázar (fortress), because I didn’t think it was that interesting, and I allowed plenty of time for the cathedral and the two synagogues.

When the Greenbergs visited, I offered to watch their kids for them for a day if they would like to go off alone, and we decided we would give them the Alfa and direct them to Toledo. “Rich can drive the stick, and I’ll navigate,” Amy said. Off they went with their maps and instructions.

After about seven hours I started to wonder where they were. It took an hour to get to Toledo, and it was hard to spend more than four hours there, I thought. “Do you think they’re lost?” I asked Mike.

He didn’t even look up from his newspaper. “They’ll be fine,” he said.

More time went by. “I’m getting worried now,” I said.

“If they need help, they’ll call,” Mike said.

The phone rang about an hour later. “We had a great time in Toledo,” Rich said, “but now we’re lost, and we can’t get there from here.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know how to tell you where we are,” Rich said at last.

I got Mike to pick up the phone. “Tell me what you did to get where you are,” he told Rich, “and then tell me what it looks like where you are. Street signs or whatever.”

Rich did his best to describe his surroundings, and we began to get the idea that they were in La Vaguada, north of Madrid. It wasn’t far away, but it was well out of the way for a Toledo-Pozuelo trip. And it wasn’t too easy to explain how to get to us.

Mike issued some instructions, told Rich to call again if he got into trouble, and sent him on his way. There was one more phone call, and a good hour of elapsed time, but Amy and Rich finally pulled into the driveway, to our relief.

It was that incident that made us unwilling to lend our car again. Rich, Charlotte and Natalie Schroeder came to see us, and we were having a great time. Charlotte had been my roommate in college, and her daughter Natalie was a good friend of Julie’s, so we were happy to be together. Within an hour after they got to our house we had them on the bus into Madrid, and we were at the main subway station, Sol, minutes later.

That was when someone dropped a set of keys in front of Rich. Rich bent down to pick them up, but—being a good New Yorker—he reached toward his back pocket, where he kept his wallet, at the same time. He was surprised to find another hand there. That was a classic pickpocket’s trick, the key drop, but Rich was too street-smart to fall for it.

The Schroeders spent some time with us and then went down to Sevilla and Jerez by train, which they enjoyed for a few days. When they came back we all went down to Aranjuez together, with both Mike and me driving (each of our cars fit five people at most).

The problem started when Charlotte wanted to take Natalie on the tour of the palace at Aranjuez. “It’s only given in Spanish,” I complained. “My kids will never go for it. We’ll just take a walk in the gardens while you go.”

“No, I hate to do that,” Charlotte said. “I don’t want to make you stay around here, but I really want Natalie to have the educational experience. Why don’t you leave one of your cars with us? You can give us directions, and we’ll go back to your place when we’re done.”

I blanched. “It’s not so easy to find your way around here,” I said, thinking of Rich and Amy. “We had some friends who were here, and we lent them a car, and they got totally lost.”

“We’ll be okay,” Charlotte said. “Rich can get by in Spanish, so if we get lost, we’ll just ask someone for directions.”

“Honestly, I don’t think you should try it,” I said, sure I knew better. “We almost had to go out and retrieve the Greenbergs. They were way off course.”

We argued the point for a while, but I was adamant. I marched my grumpy kids around the gardens for a while, and Char marched her grumpy daughter around the palace for a while, and we all went home together, equally crabby.

Another visitor was my friend Robin, who got me to agree to spend a weekend in Barcelona with her. We went back to the Hotel Colón, where we had stayed in November. We set ourselves the goal of buying leather backpacks, which were newly fashionable then, and while I showed her what I knew of the city, we did some shopping until we each got a backpack.

We were wearing our new purchases on Saturday night as we walked through the dark streets toward the Plaça Reial, where we were going to have dinner. We were just a few dozen yards from the brightly lit square, but I had the sense that someone was following us. I steeled myself and turned around—and found myself looking at two Moroccan teenagers close behind us, reaching toward our backpacks.

I screamed at Robin to run, and she pulled herself right out of the hands of the guy who was grabbing for her. We ran and hollered all the way to the plaza as the Moroccans cursed at us. We sat down immediately at a café and spent the next half-hour trying to calm down.

Much as I loved Barcelona, that was not the end of my unpleasant experiences there, because the next day I had a memorable one in Parc Güell. I knew Robin would appreciate the playful Gaudí designs there, so I showed her the colorful tiled terrace and the famous lizard I’d seen before. We stepped into a gift shop to buy some postcards, and when I stepped out—plop!—I felt something wet land right on the top of my head. It took me only a few queasy seconds to realize I’d been pooped on by a bird.

I ran in a panic to the nearby bathroom—Robin did her best to be helpful and not laugh—and I stuck my head under the faucet for a while, till I realized there wasn’t much hope of my feeling clean before I got back to the hotel and showered. This seemed worse to me than the foiled robbery.