The hands-down, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt, no-contest answer...Maine.
I should've known we were in trouble when we started off on our roadtrip and Aaron casually remarked, "I've been looking forward to this all week." Oh no he didn't. We should've turned the car around and headed home right then. I thought he'd left Them at home, but here They were, the unwanted, hijacking passengers in our car: Great Expectations. He was expecting something good...and that's when you know it's gonna be bad.
It was a hot Saturday afternoon and--expecting Fall to actually feel like Fall--we were all overdressed and overheated. The hotel room wasn't ready on time. Eliza lost her mind when we dared to put her down for a nap in the hotel crib. Owen refused his nap altogether, and crashed the entirety of Adult Hangout Time. The 10-minute wait for dinner turned into 45-minutes, which felt more like 450-minutes with two grumpy, hungry, and sleep-deprived children. And the kicker: Owen decided he should start his Sunday at 3:55AM, which meant we all got to watch a beautiful sunrise...two and a half hours after waking up. It was not, by any stretch, our best showing.
Now, compare that to our European adventure.
The kids were shockingly well-behaved on the flight. They stuck to their Eastern Standard Time schedules, allowing us to frolic around the Mediterranean beaches until midnight and sleep in till 10:00. We drank Rioja and read books on a sunny terrace while they slept for 3 hours in the afternoons. We didn't bring toys, so they played together and loved each other and didn't fight over who was holding the truck first. We savored and relaxed and enjoyed every moment of our time together. We felt victorious.
But really, even if all the silly and trivial hiccups of Maine had happened in Spain, I don't think we would've even noticed. Because the big difference was: we had zero negative expectations. We'd already envisioned a case in which both kids went bonkers on the redeye flight, or we all got Norovirus and were quarantined for a week in our rented apartment; we'd accepted the fact that we might end up cursing the very moment we ever thought that trip was a sane idea. But because that stuff didn't happen--because we far exceeded the completely hellish scenarios we'd braced for--it felt like pure magic.
So this Tale of Two Trips served as stark reaffirmation of parenthood's Golden Rule: expect nothing. Never rest on your laurels or stupidly let yourself think, "oh, we've got this." Because children have a freaking insane ability to remind you that no, you actually don't got this; don't be cocky. The likelihood of parental victory in any given moment is an independent probability--success in one instance most certainly does not predict success in another. But the good news is that the inverse is also true--that utter meltdowns don't necessarily have to be repeated--and I guess that's what keeps this whole thing interesting.
