City of Angels

It was 37 degrees in Baja when we left this afternoon and a chilly 28 in Los Angeles when we landed - J had to put on a t-shirt. This evening it has dropped to a wintry 16 degrees so time for woolly jumpers. As I write I am looking up the runway of LAX from our immensely cool hotel room balcony, the kids are asleep next door and we have a chance to reflect on our month’s beach retreat.

It was totally perfect – all we expected and wanted. We emptied our heads and allowed life to ooze through us, as one of our new friends puts it – JUST BEING. The first time I have found the space to do that for 15 years or so and how refreshing it was. It took me 10 days to even start chilling out, and those days were tricky.. my mind was just not ready to do nothing and had moments of blind panic. If viewers wish to try this at home the symptoms are drumming fingers, inability to sit still, hot flushes when you can’t get online, continuous burning desire to go somewhere and do something. After about 10 days you realise that you can’t be arsed to go anywhere and the days start to slip by with increasing pace whilst beginning to relish life.

The girls, not having lived on an adrenaline rush for the last 15 years dropped into life on a remote beach in Baja within 24 hours. They acclimatised to the heat and Mathilda started picking up words of Spanish with no encouragement from us.

Apart from the primary achievement of actually chilling out which was our main goal, we also had some other wins which are huge to us [as we have done nothing for 4 weeks] although may seem rather small to others, these were:

Mathilda is (mostly) potty trained
Clover learned to crawl
J is a tanned bombshell babe
Nick relaxed
Mathilda speaks Spanish
Clover jumped in the pool unaided [possibly by mistake]
Mathilda swam unaided with armbands [before Baja she was petrified]
J and Nick saw huge amounts of marine life
We met some great people and made new friends

So now it’s back to reality in LA. Phone downstairs and have them bring up a perfect Angus steak and a bottle of Pinot Noir, and afterwards a phonecall from the kitchen to make sure we were happy and whether we needed anything else. America sucks.