Barcelona.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

At the beginning of September, Nekos and I will celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, and we have some vacation time set aside. All along we've been planning on returning to L.A. and exploring the surrounding area. I want badly to sip a cocktail somewhere in the Palm Springs desert, hike through the scrubby bushes of Runyon Canyon, and rummage around the Southern California towns I've heard of all my life--the ones with names as warm as the tropical sunsets I imagine they're home to. I want to lay on the beach with Nekos and feel the sun on my tummy and have late nights at dusky, twinkling hotspots like Bar Marmont. I want to hold hands and eat delicious food and sleep late. This time we'll leave Tessa at home with my mom. (Last time we hired a sitter to come two nights in a row to our hotel, which was nice until the baby still wanted to wake up at 6 a.m.)

Except that we've started to dream a little bigger about our precious vacation time. At first we thought, how about Paris?

But we've since revised our dream destination to be ... Barcelona. I've been obsessed with it ever since I saw Vicky Christina Barcelona (one of my favorite movies), and Nekos says it was his favorite stop along a month-long solo trek around Europe that he took in 2004. We've priced the flights and they're not terrible. In fact, I think that a trip to Barcelona would end up costing us about the same as a trip to Los Angeles because truthfully any trip just turns out to be expensive no matter where you go.

We talked over the pros and cons over dinner the other night with the main pros being: We need to do some serious travel while we have only one kid because it's just going to get more complicated when we have another. And ... I want to honor and celebrate our marriage with a really memorable trip. And ... I've only ever been to Europe once (to Amsterdam) and felt so inspired and electrified and I want that feeling back. And ... it just looks like a really fucking rad place to visit.

The cons, however, are pretty weighty: No. 1 I would miss the hell out of Tessa. I went 72 hours without her during a New Orleans trip, but I was jonesing so bad to see her after that amount of time that I almost had the shakes. Thinking of putting an ocean between us just makes me nervous. And ... asking my mom, who is single, to keep her for five nights would be a huuuuuge request. Tessa is a lot of work and she requires an enormous amount of patience, energy, and vigilance.

So we'll see what happens. Until then, I will keep dreaming of Spain ... and L.A., too. This blog is a good place for me to dream.

Barcelona, courtesy of Flickr