Table Dancing in Barcelona
Making my wife's dreams come true... almost
For the first decade of our relationship, my wife reminded me at regular intervals of her desire to visit Barcelona.
It would take an Icelandic disaster, a cancelled weekend getaway to Lisbon, and a long drive to Denmark before I could make her dream come true.
And even then, she wasn’t quite satisfied…
April 2010 began like most Aprils. We were enjoying life as expats in the capital of Europe.
Monday to Friday I would be up at six, in the office by seven, and, after reading, writing, or responding to hundreds of emails, the work day would be over unless some crisis somewhere lit up my Blackberry and disrupted dinner.
Alternatively, I would be up at six, in a hotel breakfast room by seven, sit in meetings or airports all day, and spend my evenings in a hotel room eating one of the many creative variations of a hotel room service “Club Sandwich” while I read, wrote, or responded to hundreds of emails.
On April 12, 2010, I flew to Copenhagen where our company AGM was being held. After two days of meetings, emails, and club sandwiches, the corporate Executive Committee travelled on to Stockholm while I returned to Brussels where, in my absence, a couple of Kirsten’s relatives had arrived for a brief visit. In the taxi home from the airport, my phone was flooded with messages about the eruption of a volcano in Iceland with a name so long every message exceeded the character limit for a single text.
We enjoyed the visit with our Danish relatives. We were especially happy that they would be leaving on Friday, not because Kirsten’s mom always said that guests are like fish, after three days they begin to smell, but because we had booked a weekend getaway to Lisbon.
Thursday, April 15, airspace in most of Northern Europe was closed due to the corrosive cloud of volcanic ash from the rocky island between the North Atlantic and the Arctic oceans.
The scope of the emails and phone calls I fielded in the office on Thursday was limited to asking me how long the travel disruption would last. By Friday, the tone of communication was becoming agitated. Some people felt that as Chief Security Officer of the company, I should have been able to A) direct Iceland to stop spewing ash outside their borders, B) direct European air traffic control to reopen airspace or C) direct airlines to fly no matter what air traffic control authorities or Icelandic volcano managers said or did.
One senior leader was quite direct…
“You have to fix this! I have people coming over for a barbecue this evening!”
(the expectations of what a corporate security leader can and should do exceed the pay grade of the position…)
Our CEO called me to tell me that although he wished he could have flown home for the weekend, he’d boarded a ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia.
“I haven’t been to see our hotels in the Baltics recently, so I thought maybe this was a good opportunity to do so.”
As a lifelong hotelier, agility was in his DNA.
On Friday, April 16, it wasn’t looking good for Kirsten’s relatives return flight to Denmark. Unfailingly optimistic, they sat continually refreshing their screens. Optimism and button-pushing were to no avail. Airspace remained closed.
We cancelled our planned trip to Lisbon and looked forward to showing our relatives what weekends in Belgium were like when we sensed that one of our guests seemed uncomfortable with the thought of having to spend a few more days with us.
Maybe it’s the hosts that start smelling like fish and not the guests, I thought.
It turned out that our guest only had enough of their prescription medicine for the week. They needed to get home.
“We’ll drive you.”, we said. “Our weekend plans have been cancelled anyway.”
“No, that would be too much to ask. Flights will start up again.”, our humble guests replied.
Saturday morning, as they sat refreshing their screens, we realized time was running out.
“This is your window of opportunity.”, I said. “We have to leave now, so we can be back in Brussels by the start of the workweek.”
They packed, we all piled into the car, and nine hours later we waved goodbye as they boarded a local train to take them on the last, short, leg of the journey home.
The clear blue skies of day gave in to non-volcanic clouds rolling in from the coast. Darkness fell just as we ran into roadwork around Hamburg. Traffic slowed to a crawl.
When the rain started pelting down on the windshield we realized it was unlikely we’d make it all the way home to Brussels…
The rain continued. The stretches of narrow, single-lane traffic grew longer and more frequent.
The window wipers went methodically back and forth, back and forth with a hypnotic rhythm.
Swish… dunk, swish… dunk.
“You’re getting sleepy.”, said a voice in my head.
“WAKE UP”, yelled my wife from the passenger seat, seemingly ungrateful that I had let her sleep in peace for the hour or so it took to get past Hamburg.
Oh yeah, I was driving. No time to sleep.
We decided to stop in Bremen for the night.
Friendly reminder: European airspace had been closed for more than two days at this point. It was unlikely to reopen soon. Consider also how many flights there are from European cities like Athens, Vienna, Rome, Munich, Frankfurt, Geneva, and Zurich to the UK on any given day. People all over Europe had filled buses, cars, and trains, headed north, and hoped to get room on one of the few ferries that still operate between the mainland and the island nation. We didn’t remember or consider any of those things as we rolled into Bremen and pulled up outside the Hilton.
Kirsten went in to get us a room.
“I think we were lucky. We got the very last room they had!”, she said when she returned. “Every hotel on the Northern European coast is packed with people trying to get to the UK! ”
Yes, we were lucky.
We were starving too. We hadn’t eaten since lunch sometime on the way up to Denmark ten or eleven hours previously.
EXCLUSIVE INSIDER TIP: If you’re ever in a city you’ve never been to and you don’t know where to go, ask your hotel front desk agent where they go. They work at weird times and get paid a pittance for their efforts, but they often love going out. They know where you can get great local food, drink, and experiences at affordable prices.
“Is there any place we can get a half-decent meal at this hour?”, we asked.
“There’s a whole string of bars and restaurants down by the canal. Some of them have kitchens that are open until 2 a.m. I can’t remember the names but you’ll find them.”, he said as he used a highlighter to sketch the route on a map.
We went up to our room and unpacked. Our luggage consisted of toothbrushes and a couple of extra sets of contact lenses.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The road and walkway along the canal were lit by the kaleidoscope of colour from neon signs in the waterside bars. We asked at a couple of places and both suggested we try a place on the corner of Schlachte near the Bürgermeister-Smidt-Brücke.
“Is your kitchen open?”, we asked on arrival.
“Everything is open!” our happy hostess replied. She didn’t seem to mind that we were twice as old as the average patron post-midnight.
We both ordered a “Schnitzel Senor” and a large beer.
The schnitzel had a delicious crispy coating. The mushroom gravy it swam in was just what two starving travellers needed after spending 14 hours in a car. The french fries snapped when you bit them revealing warm, perfectly-cooked potato goodness inside.
The beer was so good we ordered seconds and thirds. Maybe fourths. I don’t know. It was thirteen years ago.
If you’d walked in as we sat enjoying our magnificent meal, you would have witnessed a slightly surreal situation. The music was booming. The kids were singing. Some were dancing on the tables. It was party central! We sat at a corner table, peacefully enjoying our food and the free entertainment…
I raised my glass to my wife and said, “Now you can’t complain anymore.”
“What do you mean?”, she said.
“Look at the menu.”, I said. “You always wanted to come here.”
Fortunately, being Danish, she would never waste a drink so she refrained from pouring hers on me.
One of Kirsten’s favourite sayings is, “Things happen for a reason.”
Shortly after our unplanned stop in the city known for its unlikely band of town musicians, the Hilton was rebranded to Radisson Blu and became a regular, planned stop for us when we drove to Denmark.
Every time we were there, we enjoyed a Schnitzel Senor at Café and Bar Celona, a place named by someone with an affinity for dad jokes and run by people who love good time hospitality.
Stay safe, Always Care
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