Travel

Olympia is a charming little city in the Pacific Northwest, set down on rolling hills surrounded by forests of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple and red cedar – a pretty, speckled egg resting in a nest of twigs.

This is the old part – the far end of the Oregon Trail, settled on Native American land by Europeans in the 1850’s – where Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company in nearby Tumwater Falls and sold his beer, if you recall, with the slogan, "it’s the water," which I’m surprised none of the hundreds of water bottlers has adopted now that Leopold’s beer business has folded.

This is Downtown Olympia, with its century-old buildings, its perfectly-proportioned Capitol, its tree-lined streets on which people drive politely and you can always find a place to park – often without a meter – near the still-family-run bookstore or café or bike shop you want to go to.

But that’s not where I wanted to go, or rather needed to go, to help my son move into an unfurnished apartment.  We needed to head over to the other part of Olympia and it is this part – which I imagine you’d find outside most other American towns of its size – that I’m still trying to figure out as the plane banks over Puget Sound taking me home.

We’d been at the Barcelona Cathedral, the old one, not the Gaudi one that’s never finished, extraordinary gothic architecture graced with gargoyles and an adjacent museum with jewel encrusted crosses, too many carats to count. The cathedral is the resting place of Santa Eulalia. Almost like a film credit, she is the co-patron saint of Barcelona and the cathedral is guarded by thirteen white geese as she was thirteen when she died. (I know this is true because I counted them.)

We were on a cruise and the ship was leaving at five. It was three o’clock and we hadn’t eaten. In the spirit of adventure, (risky, as this is sometimes not my husband’s favorite thing), I followed a native (read: person walking dog) through the back streets of Barcelona to a residential neighborhood only to discover the most amazing charcuterie I’d ever seen. In the back of a shop, a white tableclothed restaurant with wine and cheese pairings and other delights. Reservations only.

The sommelier was intractable even though there was an empty table. He insisted we come back in an hour and a half. I tried to explain to him our ship would be gone by then. In desperation, it was almost four o’clock by then and like I said, we hadn’t eaten. My family can attest to the fact that I do not do well without food.