This year, our second in France, we vowed we would make the most of the school holidays and use them as an opportunity to see more of Europe. An easy, two-hour flight will get us to most cities on the continent and knowing that the same trip would take us closer to 12 hours from Canada and have us struggling with jet lag, we are very motivated to make the most of our travel opportunities.

In the French school system, students get a two-week break from school every six to seven weeks. Cleverly, they divide the country into three zones and leap frog the holiday weeks so the entire country is not on holiday at the same time. It really is a lot of holiday time. When you are on a sabbatical year, this is great. At any given time you are either planning travel, travelling, or doing a post-mortem on one trip in order to decide on another. If you happen to be a family with two working parents, the breaks seem more of a curse than a blessing. Many families rely on grandparents or organized “stages” to keep their kids entertained and there are even organizations designed around taking kids out of the city for breaks without their parents.

For us, the school breaks were a blessing and we wanted to make the most of them. Our first vacation, this fall, took us to Italy where we visited Rome, Florence, the Tuscan countryside and Venice. The Christmas holidays took us home to Canada to see our family. Last year we joined everyone else in France in planning a February ski break but this year we bucked the trend and decided to seek out warmer temperatures while adding to our list of European countries visited and cultures experienced.

We decided that Spain and Portugal were far enough South to hope for warm weather but would not rely upon it, as would beach vacations and coastal towns. We set an itinerary around Barcelona, Seville, Lisbon and Porto to give us a taste of a big city and smaller town in each country: kind of like a sample pack to see what we like more and where we would return to one day when our focus is on depth over breadth. To that end, in each city we organized one private tour with a local guide and left one day free for exploring. 

I am a huge believer in hiring local guides to learn about a city and, while it is pricier than group tours, I feel that a good, private guide is well worth the money you pay them. We will spend three to four hours on a tour and leave with a basic understanding of what is special and unique about a city, some excellent recommendations for how to spend the rest of our time there, local tips on restaurants, a feeling that we have gotten to know at least one local person, and some excellent memories. Every guide we have met is passionate about their city and it’s history and stories. H always quizzes them about the local political landscape. Our girls remember our travel experiences by the guides we have used and I find that their favourite locations seem to have more to do with how well they connected with the guide than what they saw or what they did.

We kicked off our vacation in Barcelona. Once again, we were struck by how different the architecture looked from our familiar Paris. In Canada, not much changes in a two-hour flight from our hometown and we continue to be surprised each time we travel at how a short time can transport you into another world. Our guide, Valentina, was a native Italian who had come to Barcelona to be with her boyfriend. As with so many of the Europeans we have met, she impressed us by being fluent in Italian, French, Spanish and English. Our first stop was La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s iconic site and, hands down, the most unique church (technically, a basilica) we have visited thus far in Europe. The yet-to-be-finished masterpiece by Antoni Gaudí was mindblowing: every possible surface on the exterior decorated and the interior was like a modern, real life Dr. Suess, spiritual oasis. Gaudí never expected to complete the project in his lifetime but believed that his job was to take the project to one level and that future architects would weave in their own visions and expressions. I loved the fact that this was conceived as a community project 130 years ago and built with the support and financial contributions of the townspeople. Valentina told us that the planned completion date is 2026 but given the number of cranes currently in use and the fact that the city is in an ongoing “negotiation” with owners of nearby apartments that need to be demolished in order to build the yet-to-come portions of the church, our sense is that we shouldn’t hold our breath. At the end the tour, Valentina took us to a local café for churros and chocolate. Had that been the only thing she had done with us, I think we still would have loved her and felt it was money well spent.

Gaudí became an unplanned theme of our time in Barcelona. There was such a sense of whimsy with his buildings and even the girls were fascinated by the lack of straight lines or corners. We ended up visiting the Park Güell, La Pedrera and, our favourite, la Casa Batlló. 

One of the things we have learned over the past year of travelling is that we do not appreciate too many nights in hotels and enjoy our time more when we have an apartment and the ability to eat at home. In Barcelona we found a new balance which we all loved: we cooked for the girls then H and I went out to enjoy the Spanish restaurants that were too late, too loud and too unfamiliar for them to enjoy. Tapas: small, sharing plates of different foods, are a brilliant way to dine. We loved the variety and the opportunity to spread them out over an evening. After ordering what seemed like many plates we were always pleased as we found we spent less and ate less than we seemed to in traditional restaurants.

Being two Spanish cities, I thought Seville and Barcelona would feel like sisters but we found they seemed almost unrelated. The architecture in Seville was an unusual and gorgeous blend of Moorish/Arabian and Gothic styles, heavily influenced from the time the city was under the control of the Moors. Our guide, Jamie, was born in Seville, married a local girl and they are raising their two children there. He explained that his parents’ generation did not learn any English, that his generation had some but limited exposure but that his children now get a good portion of their day in english instruction. Fortunately for us, Jamie’s english was excellent and he taught us a lot about the region. For example, 53% of the world’s olive oil is produced in Spain and much of it is actually shipped to Italy and sold as Italian olive oil. Spain also produces all of the world’s black olives. In Seville, they have one tree or plant for every two inhabitants. They are famous for their orange trees whose fruit is so bitter that Jamie told us we would regret it for a month if we tasted them but the city harvests them to ship to Scotland to be made into marmalade. While admiring the Royal Alcázar Palace, we learned that Spain’s royal family are treated as regular citizens, paying taxes and holding jobs, and that when they are required to fulfill royal duties they receive a salary to do so. We enjoyed the small town vibe of Seville and the sunshine which, well welcome in February, we understand is almost punishing in the summertime.

Our third stop, Lisbon, was another complete departure in terms of culture and asethetique from it’s neighbouring Spanish cities. When we first arrived in Paris we were struck by the depth of history in the city and loved visiting monuments older than our home country. Travelling to Portugal, we realized that Paris is really a spring chicken by comparison. Much of Lisbon’s city center was wiped out by an earthquake in 1755 and rebuilt giving it lovely gridded streets and beautiful tile covered buildings. We loved the arch giving entrance to the city direct from the river Tagus. It was easy to imagine how impressed travellers would be as they came to Lisbon by boat and experienced such a grand entrance. Our guide, Célia, took us out of the centre to visit the Belém district where we learned about the early Portugese explorers, visited a 16th century monastery and sampled the pastéis de Belém, a secret family recipe that still remains under lock and key. Learning about Portugal’s past it seemed that they really were the centre of the world in the 15th and 16th centuries and we marvelled at how many colonies they had during that time. 

En route from Lisbon to Porto, we made a quick stop in the tiny town of Óbidos. Today, it has a population of 100 people and two main streets to wander. Curiously, there are still four churches, plus one converted to a beautiful bookstore that is worth checking out if you are ever passing by. King Dinis gave this town to his bride as a wedding gift in 1282. Seems like a pretty nice gift to me. We spent about an hour exploring the nooks and crannies of the town and doing an obligatory tasting of ginja – a sweet cherry liqueur served in a chocolate cup, which you eat afterwards. I thought I would just take a sip of H’s but after a tried it I decided it was tasty enough to spend the 1 euro to get my own.

Everyone we met in Lisbon told us that we would prefer Porto and they were right. Porto’s Ribeira district exists since the middle ages and you can still wander the arcades and tiny pathways that been there since the 15th century. Our guide, Iolanda, told us that Porto has been experiencing a huge tourism boom over the past eight to ten years and as a result, the city center has become unaffordable for most locals. Many properties have been bought by foreigners as vacation properties or rentals. The locals have a love/hate relationship with the tourists who are both pushing them out of their homes while driving their economy. J.K Rowling lived in Porto for a few years and took a lot of inspiration from the town for her Harry Potter series. We visited the café where she liked to sit and write, the bookshop that inspired the Hogwarts castle and staircases and saw groups of university students who I thought were dressed up as Hogwarts students until I learned they were wearing the uniform they have been wearing for centuries and which inspired the wizarding story. It was fun to see the port houses across the Douro River and the Pont D Maria, the bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel but my Porto highlight was getting lost in the tiny stairways and paths between the buildings and crossing the Dom Luis I Bridge on foot and looking out at picturesque Porto.

What did we learn from the sample pack? We like big cities because they have lots to do and we like little towns because they don’t. The ideal vacation includes some of each. We prefer train travel to airplanes and did not like that this trip had us taking flights to move between one town to another. Accommodations should include some time in an apartment and, if possible, a special hotel with historical significance, as a treat for one or two nights. We have loved our times in places where we can sit in the same rooms that nobles enjoyed hundreds of years ago. Sampling the local boozy offerings is just as important as the local cuisine: green wine in Barcelona, orange wine in Seville, ginja in Óbidos and port in Porto - we loved them all! Sadly, as we were travelling with only carry-on we could not bring any home with us… except a bottle of Port I insisted on getting in the duty-free en route back to Paris. I enjoy it as an aperitif - who knew that was a thing?

After all of the travelling we have done in the past two years, and for the last of our vacances scolaires, we planned to spend it in France, putting in practice all we have learned about how we like to travel. This trip was to focus on Normandy and the Loire Valley and we were going to try accrobranching (obstacle courses in the trees), visit famous Chateaux, learn about D-Day and the second world war, camp on a local farm and visit an history themed amusement park. We had booked private guides and small hotels. It was to be the cherry on the gateau, so to speak. Alas, like everyone else in the world, we have had to cancel our plans. Our last school holiday was spent in France, but we were obliged to stay in our neighbourhood and, largely, in our apartment.

Thankfully, we have learned to love family travel and we have learned to do it well. I do not know when our next trip will be but I do know that France will be be here and so will it’s beaches, war memorials, chateaux and monuments. Planning a trip does take a lot of time and we were so sad to have to unwind this last vacation. On the bright side, when the time is right, we have our “last hurrah itinerary” ready to roll and can easily put it into action. That is our plan. A bientôt, France et à la prochaine!