Somewhere between a three-hour lunch in Tuscany and watching our kids play pétanque with strangers, we realized we'd been doing travel all wrong.
Somewhere between a three-hour lunch in Tuscany and watching our kids play pétanque with strangers in a village square we couldn't pronounce, we realized we'd been doing travel all wrong.
Not wrong as in badly. Wrong as in rushed. Wrong as in optimized.
We'd been moving through places like we were checking them off. Get the castle in the morning. Lunch somewhere quick. Museum in the afternoon. Dinner. Sleep. Leave.
Europe stopped that.
Not because we planned it to. Because the places themselves didn't cooperate with our schedule. Restaurants that didn't open until 8pm. Shops that closed for three hours in the afternoon. A country road we stopped on because the light was doing something extraordinary to the olive trees and we couldn't not stop.
We started calling it "the long afternoon." That stretch of European summer where nothing is open, the light is too good to waste inside, and the only correct response is to find a shaded spot and stay there.
Our kids adapted before we did.
By week three, our seven-year-old was refusing to leave restaurants before the dessert course. Our five-year-old had learned to say "un altro po'" — just a little more — in Italian, and deployed it strategically whenever we suggested moving on.
We learned it from them.
The trip we planned would have been fine. The trip we actually took was something else entirely.