How a Volcano and a Mispronunciation Sent Us to Madrid

Sometimes plans get completely upset. The question is how you deal with them.

Last night, after our very unsatisfactory dinner at L’Ami Louis, we did our final packing, set out the clothes we would wear on the plane to Sicily, and went to bed.

I woke up this morning and read an email from our airline. Our flight had been cancelled and we had been rebooked for tomorrow. Mt. Etna had blown its top and the airport was closed.

Not a great message to wake up to.

The airline had rebooked us for the next day, but who knew what the volcano was going to be doing then? Apparently Mt. Etna does not consult airline schedules. Tomorrow’s flight could just as easily be cancelled again. Update: the flight we were rebooked on the next day was also cancelled. Our intuition was right!

At the other end of Sicily is Palermo far away from Mt.Edna. We checked flights there, but nothing was available. Then another thought dawned on us: What if we did manage to get to Sicily and then couldn’t get off the island in time to fly back to Paris for our flight home to Los Angeles?

Suddenly Sicily was beginning to sound less like a vacation and more like a hostage situation.

In the back of her mind, Cathy had always said that if we couldn’t make it to Sicily, we would go to Aix-en-Provence. We had been there before and it is charming. So we began a frantic search to figure out how to get there, where to stay, and, most importantly, where to eat. The internet hummed with our research.

We finally narrowed the hotels down to two. One was Villa Gallici Hôtel & Spa - Relais & Châteaux.

I kept calling it “Galicia.”

Cathy corrected me: “Galicia is in Spain.”
A bell immediately went off in my head. Spain!

Why were we putting ourselves through all the stress of inventing an entirely new substitute vacation in Aix-en-Provence when there was a city in Spain we already knew and loved? “Let’s go to Madrid.”

Bingo.

Much less stress. We know Madrid. We love Madrid. We know where we like to stay, what we like to do, and — most important — where we like to eat.

So tomorrow we fly to Madrid, all because I couldn’t pronounce the name of a hotel in Aix-en-Provence correctly.
The stress level immediately dropped. We got our flights, secured an extra night in Paris — never exactly a punishment — and tomorrow we head for Spain.

I know we will have some cancellation issues to deal with at the hotels in Sicily, but a volcano seems like a pretty good excuse.

Tonight, for our unexpected bonus night in Paris, we went to one of our friend Jaimie's favorite brasseries, La Rotonde. We had a classic French dinner: oysters, snails, Dover sole, a great bottle of wine, and a wonderful dessert. The restaurant looks like a movie set — mirrors, red velvet, brass, and even a mirrored ceiling.

After a day that began with a volcano blowing up our vacation, it was a pretty damn good way to end it.

And tomorrow: Madrid, Spain not Aix-en-Provence, France.
All because I said “Galicia” instead of “Gallici.”