Spring Break When Lila's With Her Dad: The Madrid Trip You Plan Six Months Out

The Notes App Starts at Halloween

I want to be clear that this trip does not happen casually. It is planned with the discipline of a corporate offsite. Melissa and I share a single Apple Note titled "SPRING" and we start adding to it at Halloween. By Thanksgiving, we have a city. By New Year's, we have flights. By Valentine's Day we have hotels. By the time spring break actually arrives, the Notes app is forty-three bullet points long and includes things like "the place with the squid sandwich near Plaza Mayor — Melissa will not eat it but Em will" and "do NOT do the Reina Sofía hungover."

The Notes app is the trip. Without it, two divorced moms with full lives would never actually get to Madrid. With it, the trip becomes inevitable.

Why Madrid

We chose Madrid because Lisbon last year was perfect and we did not want to chase the high. Madrid is what people in our group chat call a "second city" — meaning second-tier in the American imagination, not in actual quality. It is cheaper than Paris, warmer than London in April, and the museums do not require a reservation made at the moment of conception. The Prado on a Tuesday afternoon is a religious experience. The Thyssen is its smarter little sister. We did the Reina Sofía once, sober, on the second day, and looked at Guernica for forty minutes without anyone telling us to move along.

The Hotel Decision

For a girls trip you do not want a great Airbnb. You want a hotel with a lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Único Madrid in Salamanca, which has a lobby, a small bar, and the kind of front desk staff who pretend not to notice when two women in their late thirties come back from dinner at one in the morning and ask for ice. There is something about a hotel that signals, correctly, that you are not the mom this week. You are the guest.

The Itinerary, Loosely

• Day one: Land Iberia 6252 from JFK. Drop bags. Walk to the Mercado de San Miguel because it is a tourist trap that we love. Vermouth. Anchovies. A nap. Dinner at Sala de Despiece, where they slice the meat in front of you like a performance.
• Day two: The Prado, slowly. Lunch at Casa González for cheese. Afternoon nothing. Dinner at Sacha, which Melissa had read about for a year.
• Day three: A day trip to Toledo on the AVE. Cathedral. Marzipan. Back by six.
• Day four: The Reina Sofía. Guernica. A long walk in Retiro. Drinks on a rooftop.
• Day five: Flea market at El Rastro on Sunday. Lazy. Tapas crawl through La Latina.
• Day six: One more museum. One more meal. The flight home is overnight.

The Kids Get Mentioned, Briefly

I want to be honest about the rhythm of the trip. We talk about the kids on the plane out and on the plane home. In between, Lila and Austin (Melissa's son, thirteen, an eighth grader, like cousins with Lila) come up exactly twice a day, max — once when something reminds us, and once at dinner when we toast them. The rest of the time we are talking about books, exes, work, our mothers, the squid sandwich. This is not because we love them less. It is because the only way to come back as a better mother is to be, for six days, fully a person.

The Notes app is the trip. The trip is the friendship. The friendship is the part you cannot get from a hotel.

What This Trip Costs Me

Less than you would think. Iberia from JFK to Madrid in early April is usually under $700 round trip if you book in November. The hotel was $240 a night, which split with Melissa is $120. We ate well but not stupidly. The whole trip, six nights, came in under $2,400 a person, which is less than a long weekend in Aspen and includes more art.