At Home, part 32

We called Mom and Dad daily and learned that Dad was progressing well—the doctor thought he had gotten out all the tumor, and that a course of chemotherapy would serve as extra insurance—so we packed up both cars and headed east to the beach. It was a long drive, but the kids stayed in good spirits, and we found Playa Montroig using Ana’s directions. It was a pretty but unassuming place, with green lawns and a pool, a café for evening entertainment and a grocery store. Most of the place was made up of campsites, and we saw many foreign license plates there—Belgian, Dutch, British, French. There were areas with trailers and cabins, as Ana had said, and there were bathhouses and a TV room and an arts and crafts shop.

We found our little bungalow, which was cute—just a wooden shack, but it had its own toilet and shower, a private room for me, a sleeping loft above it for the kids, and a little kitchen. Julie and Lisa and Danny and Scott ran between the two cabins, making comparisons. We bought a few provisions so we could make breakfast and lunch in the cabins, and we had a look at the beach. It was rocky, not sandy, and the weather was cooler than we’d hoped, but the water was beautiful, and that great Spanish relaxation started to set in.

The days at Playa Montroig were filled with that good lazy feeling. There wasn’t much to do, and we didn’t do much. It was fun to sit in the sun when it was warm enough, and we enjoyed visiting Ana and her family when they arrived. We had had some ambition to drive into Barcelona, or to see the Roman ruins in nearby Tarragona, but that never got done. We saw the flamenco show at the café one night, and we took a lot of naps.

For dinner the first night we walked down the beach to a restaurant and took a look at the menu. Sally’s kids were no more adventurous as eaters than mine were, so I was a little worried about finding acceptable food for everyone. But the friendly waiter at this place recommended the roast chicken with french fries, which turned out to be a big hit—such a hit, in fact, that we walked down to the same restaurant every night, and the kids wolfed down many chickens and loads of fries. For dessert, as always, they got to take the thrilling stroll to the restaurant’s Camy frozen dessert locker—orange sherbet in an orange rind, lemon sherbet in a lemon peel, or coconut ice cream in a coconut shell.

We did take one excursion from Playa Montroig. We learned that a huge theme park, Port Aventura, had just opened nearby. The story went that Spain had lobbied hard to become the location for Eurodisney, but they lost out to France. There was no question, however, that the weather in Spain was better, so a group had formed to build a competitor on the eastern coast, and Port Aventura was born.

It was pretty much the usual theme park experience, except that all the signs were in Spanish. As we’d found at most museums and historical sites, the Spaniards had no idea that it might be good to put up some signs in other languages to make things easy for visitors. But other than that, there was the normal kind of junk food, the big roller coasters, and the (to us) unfamiliar cartoon characters. It was heaven for the kids, who ate and played and crabbed when they didn’t meet a ride’s height requirement.

“Let me buy you a T-shirt,” I said to Danny and Scott. “You’ll be the first kids on your block in Indiana with a Port Aventura T-shirt!”

There were some shows, too, and the Chinese Magic Show was the most memorable of those. We waited in line outside for a long time, we entered a brand-new auditorium, and we sat down to wait some more. After a good while the lights went down and an unseen announcer warned—in Spanish, Catalán, and English—that the show would soon start. “No flash photography, no recording devices. Now get ready—the Chinese Magic Show is about to begin!” But nothing happened.

We waited a few more minutes, and the lights came up, and then the lights went back down, and the same announcements came on in all three languages. We were ready—but nothing happened.

The lights came up, the lights went down, the announcements came on yet again. After a while some Chinese people peeked out from under the curtain onstage. The kids got a good laugh out of that, and Sally, Doug and I were by now having our own good laugh at the black magic that was preventing us from seeing the Chinese Magic Show.

The lights went up and down and the announcements came on four more times before they finally gave up and asked the audience to leave due to technical difficulties. We staggered back out into the sun, laughing hysterically about the great show we never saw.