Easter weekend was pretty full — I guess a good thing since I didn’t have time to get tired! On Friday my choir performed a fascinating piece by Allan Bevan for the Good Friday service called Nou Goth Sonne Under Wode. (That links to a recording of singers at the University of North Texas performing the work.) It features orchestra and a soprano soloist and 8-part choir. It was written in 2005 or so but feels more traditional in parts. Not easy by any means but a good challenge to become familiar with this work! I have had chunks of it swimming in my head for weeks.

On Saturday our family adventure was to visit Holland Ridge Farms in New Jersey. We cut tulips and visited the Cousins Maine Lobster truck. Yum! Some members of the family went to see the new Harry Potter movie that night.

Then Sunday I was up early to make sure the Easter Bunny had come. This year, our first year in this house, we are creating various new traditions, and so the Easter Bunny decided to hide the eggs outside all around the new play set! Everyone was either up or rousted for a 7:50 a.m. egg hunt, because I had to leave for church at 8:15. I sang in two services, and so sang the Hallelujah Chorus twice, plus Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, and a brand new commissioned piece called Easter Hymn by David Conte. (That links to the recording of the service; the piece is at 57 minutes).

We were supposed to premiere the piece two years ago for Easter but that did not happen since church services had ceased happening a month prior. So the composer had been waiting diligently for us to perform it so it could be published and put out into the world! This was a very singable piece with four-part brass playing an old Easter hymn atop a rolling organ melody and the choir singing a poem from Christina Rossetti. Good stuff.

After that my whole extended family (well, minus one nephew) came over for Easter dinner. We had ham and deviled eggs and a bunny cake among other things. They all toured the house and the yard. And then when they left we just sort of crashed. I don’t think I ever got entirely reset to Paris time last week, but I’ve been pretty tired right around 4-5 p.m. every day.

This week has been pretty low key after all that — I should be getting first pass pages of Tranquility by Tuesday to look through, plus digging out from the vacation backlog. I went to an actual happy hour last night (a gathering of fellow alums in my area) and I think it was the first such event I have been to in a long time…

I had booked our activities through a travel agency, and so much of the trip was straightforward: a car and guide show up at the hotel and the guide shows you around whatever attraction you are visiting. But the last two days were a little more complicated.

I sometimes get anxious about logistics, and often things are easier than I think they will be. And sometimes they are harder.

On Wednesday we were going to take a bus to Disneyland Paris. (In retrospect I should have booked a van from the hotel straight to the park, but I guess everything is clear in retrospect…) We needed to check in with the tour operator at 8:40 a.m. for the 9:00 a.m. bus. We needed to get ourselves to the bus stop, which was a few miles from the hotel. An obvious idea would be a cab, so then I was thinking about where I would get a cab, but I learned that many cabs will only take 3 people. I had four total, three of whom were kids who I did not want to send in a separate vehicle from me, so I was musing wouldn’t it be great if there were an app where you could summon an appropriately sized vehicle to take you to a destination…and then I realized I had re-invented Uber.

So I was all excited that I had solved that problem, and I dutifully summoned an Uber van on that rainy Wednesday morning only to have…no takers. The app ran and ran and I was running out of time. So I canceled and called an Uber X and asked the hotel doorman to please talk with the Uber driver who did not want to take 4 people in his car. He did finally agree (pour les enfants!) and so we made it.

(My other plan had been to call a second Uber after summoning the first one but, again, I was quite wary of sending the kids without me.)

But the transportation was easier than the Covid test ordeal. I confess that I was pondering these logistics the whole time we were in Paris. I knew we needed to take an antigen test within a day of the return flight (anyone coming to the US has to do this). Theoretically it should have been easy, as almost every pharmacy in France advertises their 15-minute test results. In countries with less testing infrastructure, hotels that cater to American tourists often have a testing option there (which is what we did in Turks and Caicos last summer) but France is well-supplied. Most people would do the Covid tests the day before (Wednesday for a Thursday flight) but… this happened to be our scheduled Disneyland Paris day.

In retrospect, I wish these had been scheduled in a different order — maybe the Louvre on Wednesday, and Disney on Monday — but I didn’t think of this until the agency had booked everything. The tour agency had suggested getting a test at a pharmacy near the Disney bus stop, but the pharmacy didn’t open until 8:30 a.m., and with the bus check in at 8:40 this seemed like it might not work (and given the Uber issue it really wouldn’t have). Pharmacies tend to close at 8 p.m., and while I had hoped we would get back at 7:30 p.m. from Disney and could do it then, we made a strange detour back to the park (I think someone missed the bus? Maybe?) and then got to the bus stop at 8 p.m.

So we had to do the test the morning of departure, which was really not ideal. I got the kids up to make it to a pharmacy near our hotel right when it opened at 8:30. Entering all the information on French forms online four times was fun (new learning: I live in the États-Unis, which I knew, but in a drop down menu, the e with an accent often comes at the end of the alphabet, and not with the “E” section…kind of hard to find!) We got the tests done and they said I would be emailed the results in 15 minutes.

We went to breakfast, and 15 minutes came, and went, and 30 minutes, and 45 minutes…

At this point I was deep into my daily 30-minute freak out. Our plane was leaving in a few hours! I knew I had the information correct on the forms because I got an initial email that I had registered. So I left the kids in the hotel room and went back to the pharmacy to investigate. The tech who had done the tests (and who didn’t speak much English — not that she should be expected to! — but I’m just mentioning this to explain why the whole experience was more complicated) conveyed to me, through a random lady shopping in the pharmacy who agreed to help translate, that the pharmacy receptionist hadn’t come to work until 9:45, and hence the tests hadn’t been put in yet.

So much for results in 15 minutes. But her colleague had just shown up! So that was good — I did get the results within 10 minutes then. But, sadly, though I could see we were all negative in the test results section, I kept getting one of those “error” and “forbidden” codes when I clicked on the link to get the digital certificates. Trying to enter a screen shot of the results page in the VeriFly app resulted in the app not being able to read the results. I really needed a clear QR code. (I imagine I could have shown my phone to someone at the airport and checked in that way but that would have meant an entirely separate wait there, and the uncertainty of whether our results were in the right form…).

So…picture me asking s’il vous plait if the pharmacy could print my results. I don’t believe they were thrilled about this, and there was a mix-up when they re-entered the children’s birthdates meaning we needed to do some reprinting, but half an hour later, I had four printed EU digital test certificates with lovely and clear QR codes that the VeriFly app just gobbled up. I got back to the room just in time to load up the suitcases into the car for the airport.

Fun morning! Travel in the Covid era has this added uncertainty that can ratchet up the anxiety a lot. But as often happens, now that I have leapt through that particular hoop, my trip becomes rosier in retrospect. I forget that in my jet-lagged state I would be up at 2 a.m. worrying about how to make a within-1-day Covid test happen. And hey, we made it home. All good in the end.

Photo: Another picture of Versailles….

I was remembering this when contemplating a biking add-on to our Versailles excursion during last week’s Paris spring break trip. I have been to Versailles (though it has been a while) and while it is opulent, and on the list of required destinations when in Paris, I suspected the children would only have so much tolerance for rooms of old furniture. I figured biking would perk everyone up.

And it did! We got our bikes and stopped at some of the “extra” castles on the estate (The Petit Trianon, the Grand Trianon, etc.). Then we just circled the pools between Versailles and Grand Trianon — seeing far more of the grounds than we ever would on foot. The little wildflowers had exploded all over the forest carpet, and the green on the trees seemed to be rolling in thick like fog. We pedaled hard and listened to the birds and the air swooping past us and the pleasant spring air made the world feel perfect.

All was not perfect of course, but something about a good pedal on a nice day can make you feel that it might be possible. I stopped worrying about the “ordeals” of the next few days on the trip, at least for a few hours. That will be the subject of a later blog post this week!

In other news: We made it to Holland Ridge Farms over the weekend to see the tulips (thus crossing another item off my Spring Fun List). Five little sets of hands picking tulips meant we left with a lot of tulips, but hey, there could be worse souvenirs. My 12-year-old and I had gone together last year and discovered the Cousins Maine Lobster truck. So he and I were reminiscing about that a lot and how it has been quite a year since. It feels like longer than 365 days! But I guess in life that’s probably a good thing.

Photo: Versailles

We packed a lot in. We saw the Musee D’Orsay on the first day, though the kids were a bit over tired to appreciate the art at that point. We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. They got crepes from a street vendor and macarons from a fancy shop. We toured the Louvre. We visited Versailles and then biked around the surrounding forest/park. We went to Disneyland Paris for a day.

It wasn’t the easiest trip. International travel rarely is. I haven’t traveled to Europe since 2018 and I am out of practice — meaning that while I remembered to pack the outlet converters I forgot to pack the melatonin and paid for it at 2 a.m. as my body refused to sleep. Four people in a hotel room is also not conducive to sleep, and the kids have a limited tolerance for culinary adventures. So we ate in cafes/bistros that had pizza and pasta every night (fortunately, many very cute places along the various boulevards have such offerings). The obtaining of a Covid test within 24 hours of departure (for the US) turned out to be far more of an ordeal than it should have been, given how every French pharmacy advertises the 15-minute turnaround of their rapid tests. Perhaps that will be its own post.

Anyway, it is always easier not to travel, especially internationally, but then I know I would miss out on some peak experiences. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower is perhaps a travel cliche — one reason I’d never done it on my adults-only trips to Paris — but with kids it seemed like a must-do and on a clear spring day it was stunning, cliche or not. The Mona Lisa draws the crowds, but I always love looking at the handful of other Da Vinci masterpieces in the Louvre, such as the perfectly composed extended family portrait of Anne, Mary, and Jesus holding a lamb. Riding a bike through the greening woods where Louis XIV lived was sublime. The cool breeze on my face and zipping past the rippling water by the palaces will remain a favorite memory. And my kids are convinced that the Big Thunder Mountain Railway at Disneyland Paris is better than the one in Orlando (you whoosh around in the dark for quite a while!).

So, having done the trip, I am happy to have done the trip. The kids seemed to have enjoyed it too, though my eldest said it was good except for the 30 minutes every day when I would freak out (someday, if my children are herding their own children around a foreign country, perhaps they will understand…). There were moments my experiencing self was unsure. I am definitely unsure about traveling internationally with even younger kids (the older ones are 14, 12, and 10; the 7- and 2-year-old stayed home with my husband). But I was glad to be able to show my kids another part of the world. We had a lot of good conversations over those plates of pizza and pasta. I practiced a little of my French! Not too much, though, given how many people in Paris speak English. We didn’t stay in a particularly touristy part of Paris but even so, many restaurants posted French and English menus outside. At one point my daughter remarked that “We’re talking and probably no one knows what we’re saying” and I’m like…um, I’m pretty sure they know what we’re saying. Which is helpful when traveling internationally! There are definitely places that would have been harder.

Now, after a good night’s sleep in my own bad, my memories are even rosier. Isn’t that funny?

Photo: Random Paris street scene

In the meantime, I posted two Medium columns this week (as I attempt to get ahead of the week off…). I wrote that When It Comes to Friendships, It’s OK to be the Planner. I also wrote that we should Draw Little Conclusions, Not Big Ones.

The Before Breakfast podcast covered several topics this week, including one on thinking “50 not 60” (minutes, that is), when scheduling meetings, to “Log your pauses” so you can make sure your breaks are actually rejuvenating, and “Don’t wait to apologize.” That last one suggests that if you think an apology might be called for, it’s best to do it as soon as possible.

If you’re looking for reading material, Mary Laura Philpott’s new book, Bomb Shelter, is out next week. She tells the tale of launching a teen with serious health challenges out into the world. She also sends a very cool newsletter (sign up there).

I finally picked up a copy of Cheaper by the Dozen, so that might be my next read!

The next Best of Both Worlds Patreon online meet-up will be Monday, April 18th at noon, eastern. If you’d like to join us, please join by then!

We have been ordering like crazy from a company called Fast Growing Trees. Redbuds, cherries…the idea is to make this yard bloom in spring and very colorful in fall. I’m currently obsessed with fall-blooming camelias (some are “Yuletide” camelias) which bloom in fall to winter and hence will add color at a different time. As for normal blooming times, I’m figuring out when to go to Holland Ridge Farms to see the tulips…

Photo: Sadly, there don’t seem to be any of the magnolias blooming this year — the flowers shriveled up in the cold snap. This picture is from years past…

However, beautiful as everything will be, there are still ways to make more memories from this fleeting season.

A few weeks ago, there was a question in the comments of how my family finds local events and activities to do. Some of this is just a function of living in a place for a long time. People tell you about places. You read about them. A kid goes to a birthday party somewhere. If you find two new activities you like each year, after ten years, this is 20 things — quite a lot to choose from!

So for instance in 2021 I learned about the downtown ice skating rink, Hawk Mountain (with its River of Rocks hike), and I learned about Holland Ridge Farms. All of those are now in the rotation. In 2020, I learned about the Philadelphia Auto Show (going just a few weeks before the world shut down…) and about Weaver’s Orchard. Certainly pick-your-own farms have been on my radar for a while, but we’ve explored a number and I tend to like the Weaver’s vibe.

We are or have been members at a lot of local institutions/museums, and as a result we’re on a lot of mailing lists. So when a place has an event or festival coming up, we hear about it. If it sounds good, my inclination is to try it. Some things are better than others (see the animatronic dinosaurs…probably not my favorite, though it was fine for 20 minutes). But you get out of the house in any case, and if it’s great it can go on the long-term list. This inclination to try stuff is nudged along by my “One big adventure, one little adventure” rule. It doesn’t happen every week, but the goal is more weeks than not!

With that in mind, here are this year’s Spring Fun List ideas:

See the cherry blossoms. The intention is going to Washington DC, which we did in 2019 and really enjoyed. If that doesn’t work (tricky timing with weekends and weather and such) there is a row of cherry trees in my new yard! They bloom later in the spring (closer to May) but are going to make me feel like I’m living in a wedding magazine photo spread for a few days.

See the tulips at Holland Ridge Farms. I bought the “anytime” tickets for the family so we can choose our day for nice weather and peak blooms. This year they apparently expanded their fields and their parking, so if we aren’t going to the Netherlands (truly lovely, by the way), this might be the next best thing.

Take an adventurous spring break trip. For superstitious reasons, I tend not to talk about my travel until it’s over, so this list entry is a bit vague. But fingers crossed this trip is going to happen.

Visit NYC. I have an overnight trip planned in late April, which should be during peak blooms. I’m looking forward to doing some walking around.

Listen to spring music. I really enjoyed doing this last year, listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and so forth. This will upgrade my in-the-car music experience.

Go on a family bike ride.

Take photos of flowers and print some up. I really like botanical art in general, so this is a nudge to create some myself.

Read a spring-themed book. I welcome suggestions. Could be non-fiction or fiction, as long as it’s not depressing or intense fiction (I just…can’t right now).

Go outside after dinner. Since none of my children sleep anyway, we may as well go ride bikes and pogo sticks and dig in the dirt. There may be a new swing set coming too…

Turn my Instagram feed into a flower show. I had a lot of fun last night following copious flower farm accounts. If I’m going to scroll mindlessly, may as well make it a lovely experience!

What’s on your spring fun list?

Photo: I no longer live at the house with this magnolia tree, though I might drive by to pay it a visit. I’m hoping to find a new favorite tree in the new yard this spring.