I have spent a good part of my life traveling.

And, like most travelers, I have usually followed a familiar pattern.

Arrive.

Check in.

Figure out what you absolutely have to see.

See it.

Move on.

Two nights here. Three nights there. Maybe four if you really like the place.

Then pack again.

This trip to Spain has been different.

Alexis and I decided to stay in one place for three weeks.

Calpe, on the Costa Blanca.

Same house.

Same neighborhood.

Same grocery store.

Same roads.

 

Same view.

And something interesting has happened.

We have stopped feeling quite so much like visitors.

We are not exactly locals.

But we are no longer simply passing through either.

We are practicing living here.

Part of what made this possible is something called Home Exchange.

The idea is pretty simple.

Rather than staying in a hotel or renting an apartment, people make their homes available to other members of the exchange community. Sometimes two families literally swap homes. Sometimes the arrangement works through a points system.

But the basic idea is the same.

You live in somebody else’s home for a while.

I had done it once before, briefly, in Paris.

This is the first time I have tried it for three weeks.

And three weeks changes everything.

A hotel encourages you to go out and see things.

A home encourages you to settle in.

There is a kitchen.

A washing machine.

A living room.

A refrigerator that gradually begins filling up with your food.

You stop asking, “What should we see today?”

And start asking, “What do we feel like doing today?”

That is a very different question.

Our mornings have developed their own rhythm.

Sometimes I work.

Sometimes we hike.

 

Nothing terribly ambitious, but enough to get us out into the hills and remind us that the Costa Blanca is far more than beaches.

Yesterday we finally went to one of those beaches.

Finally.

We have been here for two weeks.

Every day we have watched hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people heading toward the water.

Families carrying umbrellas.

People dragging beach chairs.

Children with inflatable everything.

And somehow we had never gotten around to actually going.

Yesterday we did.

We rented snorkeling equipment — goggles, fins, boots — and spent part of the day swimming, exploring underwater, and doing something we had apparently forgotten to schedule:

lying on the beach.

Two weeks in a Mediterranean beach town before going to the beach.

That tells you something about how this trip has unfolded.

We have been busy.

But not sightseeing-busy.

Living-busy.

We have taken Spanish lessons once a week.

We have taken dance lessons.

Lots of them.

Private lessons.

Group lessons.

Bachata.

Salsa.

Two-hour classes on Wednesday and Friday.

About 25 people in the class.

And Alexis and I are the only Americans.

In fact, the only English speakers.

That has been one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole experience.

We don’t always understand what the instructor is saying.

We watch.

We imitate.

We occasionally go in the wrong direction.

And somehow we keep dancing.

I also went looking for pickleball.

Instead, I discovered that padel is much more prominent around here.

So, naturally, I signed up for a lesson.

Then another one.

I am still learning how to use the walls, find the corners and understand why the ball sometimes seems to be coming from behind me.  More about padel in a future blog.

I have played golf.

Alexis used the same afternoon for a manicure and a facial.

That sounds like a small thing.

But it is exactly the kind of thing that makes this feel different from a normal trip.

Who schedules a manicure on a three-day visit to Spain?

You do it when you are living somewhere for three weeks.

We have explored the surrounding countryside.

We drove into the mountains to Guadalest, a tiny mountain village perched dramatically on a rocky ridge, with a castle above it and sweeping views over a turquoise reservoir and the surrounding mountains.

We have gone looking for restaurants that required a drive rather than restaurants conveniently located near a hotel.

We spent a day in Valencia.

And then came back.

That is another change I have noticed.

When you stay in one place for three weeks, a day trip really becomes a day trip.

You go somewhere.

And then you come home.

I find myself using that word now.

Home.

Not our home.

But home for these three weeks.

One of the most memorable experiences was going to a local Rotary Club lunch.

There were about 40 Rotarians there, men and women, and they could not have been more welcoming.

We had one interesting conversation after another.

One of them was with a former mayor of Calpe, which led to a fascinating discussion about the town, tourism, growth and the challenge of preserving local identity while welcoming the enormous number of people who come here every year.

That is not the kind of conversation you usually have when you are racing through a place in two days.

You have to stay long enough to meet people.

Because we have been here long enough to notice what is happening locally, we also found ourselves at the celebration of Nuestra Señora de la Merced — Our Lady of Mercy — connected with the local parish and its September feast day.

That is the kind of thing we might easily have missed on a short visit.

But when you stay in one place for weeks, local life begins to reveal itself.

You start noticing the festivals.

You start recognizing the routines.

You start meeting people.

And in the evenings we have developed another routine of our own.

Around 9 o’clock, we head toward one of the promenades in Calpe, Altea or the Mascarat area where we are staying.

We eat.

We walk.

We watch families.

We watch children still playing at an hour when American children would probably have been in bed for some time.

We watch older couples strolling together.

We watch the Mediterranean in the dark.

And sometime around 11, we head home.

Then we do it again the next day.

What we have not done is rush.

We have not awakened every morning with a list of eight things we absolutely must accomplish before sunset.

We have not packed and unpacked every other day.

We have not spent half the trip checking into hotels, figuring out where to park, finding the next train, and wondering whether we left something in the last room.

That is the part I am beginning to appreciate most.

There is a temptation when traveling to confuse seeing more with experiencing more.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

We could have used these three weeks to visit six or seven places.

Maybe more.

Instead, we chose one.

And because of that, we have had time to take Spanish lessons.

Time to learn bachata badly.

Time to try salsa.

Time to discover padel.

Time to play golf.

Time to hike.

Time to drive into the mountains.

Time to attend a local festival.

Time to sit down with Rotarians and talk about the future of the community.

Time to finally spend a day at the beach.

Time to walk the same promenade enough times that it starts to feel familiar.

And time to do nothing particularly memorable at all.

That last one may be the most important.

Travel does not always have to be extraordinary every minute.

Sometimes the luxury is simply having enough time for an ordinary day somewhere extraordinary.

That, I think, is what these three weeks have given us.

We came to Calpe expecting to stay here.

Somewhere along the way, we started living here.

Not permanently.

Not completely.

But long enough to develop habits.

Long enough to recognize places.

Long enough to stop trying to see everything.

And long enough, occasionally, to forget that we are traveling at all.

Maybe that is the difference between visiting a place and actually getting to know it.

You stop asking what you have seen.

And start noticing how you have lived.