My dad groaned as I spread the map across my lap and ticked off driving times. “Eight hours from Cannes to Barcelona, 11 hours from Barcelona to Lisbon, 13 hours to Bilbao, 16 hours to Paris.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t fly?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” I said.
We met in Cannes, where my parents had been celebrating their 32nd wedding anniversary at the Hotel Majestic. Even off-festival, supernaturally beautiful women strolled the streets behind poodles with cinnamon sticks in their mouths, and there were bare breasts, as promised.
But Cannes was only a launching pad. In the morning, we looted the hotel breakfast buffet for croissants and bananas for the road, waved goodbye to my mom (who was going home) and headed out of town in a tiny, silver egg-shaped Mercedes on the narrow lanes of French Autoroute 8.
After several hours, we came to a horizontal chain of booths staffed by officers in loose, sand-tinted uniforms. I rolled down my window, flushed to test some newly acquired Spanish.
“Buenos dias,” I tried, brightly.
The guard waved us through as if we were at a fast-food drive-thru. “That was it?” my dad asked. And then we were in Spain.
In a car the borders are even less significant than the tolls. But while the borders mean little, the land itself starts to mean more. Already Spain felt different than France–more things growing, more totemic rocks on mountains, more dusty vistas. This was the Catalan Spain I would remember, all done in red brick and meditative hills. We reached Barcelona in the afternoon.
Barcelona is a veritable international city, a San Francisco with motor scooters. To slash hotel costs and maximize time in each city, we planned to spend two days in each place, with one night in a hotel, then one in the car trading catnaps on the way to our next destination. But every hotel and hostel in Barcelona along the popular La Rambla was completo, and the car was impossible to move through the narrow streets clogged with traffic so we wandered the strip with the other lost souls.
But living stupidly is not unlike living boldly. Down an alley chasing the rumor of a vacant, pricey double, we saw the lurid sign for La Palmera. My dad hesitated. “Are you sure we shouldn’t find somewhere else?” I hit the buzzer. The pension stood on the second-floor in a retiring stone garret. It had plain, clean rooms. I flung open doors to the two small balconies, and the sun poured over the white bed sheets. It cost $25 a night and seeped character.
On the streets, enterprising Catalans painted their bodies and emerged as pewter ice princesses, bronze centurions and red devils. They stood as still as posts, then blew kisses to tourists who flipped coins into their upturned hats. We settled in at the cafe Amaya, one of the old stalwarts on the local tapas scene, for pitchers of sangria, doughy empanadas, calamari and a bowl of gazpacho.
Early the next morning, nearby on La Rambla, the iron-forged Boqueria market–a modernista icon spanning a block with its rail station-like roof –hummed, busy and booked with brash human voices. We marveled as oak-armed women in tight white aprons showed the business end of butcher knives to 32-pound cod next to cornucopias of tumbling fruit. Fist-sized white and brown eggs filled wooden crates. Fresh hunks of beef swung from hooks. But this was our day for art and architecture.
Picasso museums are like war stories in European cities: everybody’s got one. But Barcelona’s–a short walk through the Gothic Quarter from the market–boasts a key collection of his early portraits (when he was only 14), a room devoted to the elegiac works of his blue period and the gallant menu covers with which he paid his way at the hipster turn-of-the-20th-Century artist hangout, Els Quatre Gats, still stationed around the corner.
In this region, though, Picasso plays only a supporting role. Barcelona means Antoni Gaudi, the celebrated Catalan architect. Gaudi imagined buildings even amateurs could marvel at. He forged fantastic exteriors that abandoned straight lines and poured onto the streets lusciously, juicily–and then ringed the insides with anguished parabolic arches and guilt-ridden banisters of twisted iron. He was a seer-like modernist expressionist and a tortured, religious mystic. He built places you remember from your dreams.
We began near our hotel at the Palau Guell, just steps off La Rambla. The horrid early building with art nouveau gates was done in the 1880s as a guest quarters for Gaudi’s patron but finally grew into its own as a torture chamber for anti-fascist dissidents during the Spanish Civil War.
Up the broad Passeig de Gracia, the Casa Batllo blooms from a row of buildings: a sugar-shack with a rippled facade. It couldn’t be more different from the grim Palau Guell in theory. That is, until you notice that its metal balconies resemble the skulls of animals.
Gaudi’s Casa Mila, built between 1905 and 1910, is only a bit farther up. Also called La Pedrera–the quarry–because of its cavernous appearance, it was built as an outlandish apartment building and dominates an entire city block.
The outside looks like a wedding cake melting in the sun. An interior courtyard flows upward like a pipe organ or a prayer. Statuettes designed like spurned chess pieces populate the dune-shaped roof, which in turn is supported by hypnotic circles of severe parabolic arches.
The top floor contains a museum devoted to all his work, computer terminals that flash details of his projects around Barcelona and bird’s-eye models of choice structures. For an additional fee, you can walk through one of the apartments, restored to approximate a turn-of-the-century interior.
Late in life, Gaudi impaled his energy on a church, La Sagrada Familia, which he worked on upwards of 40 years. When his funds ran out, he went door to door collecting for its completion, until finally a tram mowed him down, and no one would assist him because of his haggard appearance, and so he died.
To reach the church–a marriage of neo-Gothic and Moorish influences with more than a little fantasy that is still far from completed–we walked down the Carrer de Provenca until we glimpsed its unicorn-horn spires, modeled after the sacred mountain Montserrat outside the city and looking like years of sedimented sand.
Finally, we took the subway to Gaudi’s Park Guell. With its arched bridges, teardrop plazas inlaid with tiles and raised pathways designed like tree roots, the park literally crawls out of the earth. A broad stairway sweeps up to it, and the plazas and pathways offer one of the most striking vistas you’ll see in all Barcelona.
Leaving Barcelona, we trailed arrows in circles like snipe for two hours before the roads spit us onto a real highway. Renaults flew by us at 100 mph. My knuckles turned white.
We weaved past a creepy town called Alibi, and then hit the wide flat roads. My dad was asleep and I was fading fast. I opened my window, turned up the radio and ate pistachio nuts to keep me conscious until Madrid. Then I slept, and he drove. We stopped only for gas.
When my eyes opened, everything was different. The darkness had dissolved. I asked where we were.
“Portugal,” my dad said, eyes glued to the road.
I fell back asleep and woke up in Elvas, a village near the border. A massive aqueduct spanned one side of the road, and far up a hill stood an old stone wall. Through the windshield, the scene struck me as one an invader might have seen centuries ago.
Our hotel got noticeably nicer in Lisbon, as my dad put his foot down. When it landed we were ensconced in the Hotel Presidente, a monument of faded elegance with air-conditioning and soft beds.
We stayed, as usual, for a night. We dined at the elegant nook A Primavera, in the rambling neighborhood of the Bairro Alto, which also houses many of the African and fado clubs.
Tall flat stone houses, entangled like roots, leap over one another in the Alfama district, one of the few sections of the city to withstand the 1755 earthquake. A close, hivelike network of alleyways makes it as compact and secretive as a walnut. My dad and I spirited through the streets on our one night in town. Small boys in knee-length shorts kicked yellow balls against the ruins of Moorish temples after midnight. Whiskered men in open-collared shirts sprawled before open doorways with bottles. Then, after blocks of silence along streets arching upward, we’d come upon the creaky charming restaurants serving strong wine and fado. My dad breezed through the doorway of one of the bars, and I tagged behind.
A dozen men and women leaned their elbows on five hard wood tables. Yellow light danced on the walls. A woman in a plain black church dress sang, and from her, I learned about the fado–songs that are wails with love songs sleeping inside them. She belted them out.
The next morning we rambled down the highway to Belem, a district on the outskirts of the city that is a tribute to Portugal’s conquesting past. By the translucent aqua of the Atlantic inlet, a sad, aristocratic monastery looms, a stone lookout turret sprouts from the water, and manicured gardens and a giant concrete ship bear witness to the mood of arrogant grandeur that launched the small country’s colonial ships to India. We spent time wandering through the old monastery, marveling at the angular symmetrical windows, the trilled columns and the cloistered hush that fell over its garden. Inevitably, we got lost for at least a half an hour leaving or entering any city. So by the time we hit the A1 highway, I was hardly ready for the motorcycle race. Pretty-boy Portuguese bikers roared past us on the left for hours. They clogged the gas stations with their modish haircuts and flashy speed-racer suits. Fans cheered on the overpasses, and I was altogether happy when we arrived in peaceful Porto, major city of the Port wine country in the north. We double-parked, and ate the best meal of the trip.
Men stood at a counter and hunched their shoulders on the first floor of Pedro dos Frangos. Golden brown chickens rotated over open flames. Upstairs there was a modest family-style restaurant where the waiters spoke only Portuguese–no Spanish, no French and no English that they’d admit to. In a broken “Blade Runner” melange of lenguas, I asked for chicken…rice…salad…french fries–and they brought us all of them on a silver tray. The whole thing cost an eminently reasonable $23. We were in and out of the town in two hours.
All night we drove over the Tras-Os mountains. My sleepy dad misread the signs and took us down the narrow pass headed the wrong way. “Dad,” I said, “all the signs are facing the other direction.” We barely backed off an exit before a truck, horn blaring, stampeded the space where our car had rested moments before. We arced around the forgotten roads by the Portuguese border, and the guards could not have cared less who was entering the next country.
Later in Spain, we stopped by the side of the road. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and six layers of stars hung in a dome above us. Robotic music from a high-wattage German station floated over the car radio and across the borders. My dad drove all night, and talked about himself when he was my age. The borders of the world shrunk to our car, and it became a little pod, as we pitched ourselves into the night.
At 6 a.m. on a Monday we hit Bilbao, Spain. We’d planned to see the Guggenheim Museum first thing before heading to San Sebastian, where we’d spend the night, then cruise straight to Paris. I groaned when I noticed in the guidebook that the museum was closed on Mondays. We decided to head for San Sebastian then and double back the next morning, tacking two hours on to the drive.
After more than 11 hours in the car, my dad rocked at the wheel. The landscape consumed me. The A8, the highway that bursts through Basque country, has to be one of the most beautiful, pastoral highways in the world, despite the paper mills pumping out black clouds and sewage. Sheep balanced on the cliff faces to graze. White houses with red roofs hung like whitecaps on the green waves of the mountainsides. It was as intense as it was dramatic.
I took over the driving near San Sebastian as we wound down to the sea. It was early morning, and the locals were waking up to walk their dogs–or themselves–by the water. As my dad slept in the car, I walked to the sea wall and watched a handful of boats rocking softly in the distance under a cliff. The Basque town hugs the water, towering over La Concha beach and the cafes on the promenade.
Later, as I took my turn sleeping in the car, my dad checked into the Hotel Londres y de Inglaterra–which for the uninitiated means that we went to Spain and stayed in the Hotel of London and England, in a suite no less, twice the size of our rugged little charmer in Barcelona and six times the price. It was quite beautiful, with a vaguely English dark wood decor and a great glass elevator. To celebrate, we both took a nap like sleeping-sickness victims.
We found lunch at the Biarritz-style bistro Panier Fleuri, known for game. I had pigeon, but I missed the rolled up sleeves and full-bodied flavors of the spit-roasted chicken in Porto. We went back to the room with plans to hit the town for tapas that evening. We woke up 14 hours later. The trip was starting to catch up with us.
We retraced our path to the industrial shipbuilding town of Bilbao and its new hat, the Guggenheim designed by American Frank Gehry. We discovered that the museum actually is open every day during summer, at which news we dutifully groaned again.
The bouquet of bent titanium–something of an ironic comment on the post-industrial landscape surrounding it–was striking, but underwhelming. The back of the museum, though, was engaging, simulating a sort of futuristic Roman amphitheater wrapped in a dinosaur-tail arched walkway.
Art wise, the place comes off like the Guggenheim New York’s garage, filled with outtakes from their vaults. Besides the colossal and poetic quartet of works by Germany’s Anselm Kiefer, the collection as of yet is somewhat barren, at least for someone used to big-city museums. We rushed through it in three hours, took a half-hour detour to Guernica, seat of the Basque independence movement, buckled our seatbelts and launched for Paris.
As we bisected France through the city of Bordeaux (home of wine and miserable traffic) on the E5, I thought not of the sights in the cities, but of the scenes from the car: My dad nervously hurrying a roadside call of nature because a crew of rowdy, singing Spaniards was marching toward us; the tortuous snakes they call roads slithering up the Spanish mountainsides; the white houses on the A8; the border guards who know the borders stopped mattering long ago.
We propped our eyes open with Coca-Cola and finally, on that last night, coasted somewhere into the Paris area after midnight.
A detour sign channeled us onto a baffling pipeline of unmarked streets to nowheresville. I hunched my shoulders, rested my chin on the wheel and sighed, “Do you think we’re even anywhere near Paris?”
“I think so,” my dad said, glancing to the right. “Isn’t that the Eiffel Tower?”
It jutted over the Seine and gleamed. We pulled the car over. We walked over to it. The plaza was strewn with people. We stood underneath the support arches, and at exactly 1 a.m., it exploded. Hundreds of strobe lights, hidden in its metal scaffolding like a school of retiring fireflies, began to flicker in unison. We stood there with the others, gaping as the Eiffel Tower, tricked up for the millennium, signaled like it was the skeleton of a new constellation.
I could tell you more about what happened on our 2,700-mile drive. How we ate pasta at an all-night pizza place on the Champs-Elysees, how we got lost in the service tunnels that circuit the bowels of De Gaulle airport, how we slept in the back seat at a rent-a-car parking lot for four hours until it was time for my flight. But what would be the point?
This is all you need to know: Driving across Europe and into Paris at 1 a.m. makes the Eiffel Tower look new, like a space radio tower calling aliens, just like it did when the Parisians on the ledge of modernity saw it in 1889, like it could scratch the sky. Isn’t that enough?
