Costa del Sol

Monday was a twelve-hour day, starting with Microsoft Teams and ending with Zoom. Tuesday: rinse and repeat. Sure, lawyers are not the most sympathetic bunch, by reputation more Peter Petrovich Luzhin than Atticus Finch, but I still need a proper vacation. A one-week road trip last summer to Gold Beach, Oregon was nice, but not nearly enough and, now, seemingly eons ago.  Costa del Sol would be an excellent post-pandemic option. 

My last visit was a few years ago, after 30+ year hiatus. In the late 1980s, my grandparents, both medical doctors, were kind enough to take me, then a high schooler, on trips to Italy one year and to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco the next. Wake up early, enjoy a typically competent continental breakfast at a three-star hotel, and board the Globus Gateways bus for a day of intrepid sightseeing.  To relax, we bookended the trips with week-long stays in Sorrento and Torremolinos, respectively. Sorrento was fabulous, and a superb base for day trips to Capri, Positano, and Naples. Similarly, Torremolinos, in addition to featuring a long, broad beach (and equally impressive promenade), served as the launch point for trips to Granada (The Alhambra) and Gibraltar. 

My grandmother would have been sixty, and my grandfather would be turning sixty in a few months. He would continue to actively practice medicine for another seventeen years, when my grandmother’s health started failing in earnest, and but for that, probably would still be practicing now. I have been working for twenty-five years; the prospect of practicing law for another thirty years (to approximate my grandfather’s medical career) is daunting, to say the least. To him, medicine was a calling. He could wake up early, return late, and not “feel” the strains of the day. At one point, while in his fifties, he commuted from San Francisco to Sonoma (100 miles roundtrip), where he worked as an attending physician at the county hospital.  When he got home, he ate quickly, before opening the doors to his private practice, to see even more patients.  My approach, for better or worse, is more pragmatic. To close the loop, my grandmother, while the better medical student, having finished at the top of her class, practiced until our immigration to the United States, before supporting my grandfather and running his medical office for more than twenty years. 

Costa del Sol is still pleasant in October. The crowds are gone, the Mediterranean is still warm, and the days are long enough, although, to my surprise, it does not get light until after eight in the morning. This time, Marbella was our base, an apartment rental on the beach, and behind it, low hills and further back the Sierra Blanca range. We arrived in Marbella at night, the air warm and heavy, in sharp contrast to Granada, not more than a few hours away, but at not inconsiderable elevation. 

It rained the following morning, before glorious sunshine revealed and enveloped the town. We spent the rest of the day exploring and enjoying a mostly empty beach. The following day, a Friday, if memory serves me right, we drove to Gibraltar, parking on the Spanish side and walking a short distance across the border, before boarding a bus for a quick trip to the base of the cable car. The rather circuitous hike down the Rock was tiring enough, especially with temperatures nearing eighty degrees, though the hike up the Rock probably would have been more satisfying. 

Gibraltar is fascinating, not only for its history, location, geopolitical significance, thirty-four miles of tunnels, but also for its population of three hundred or so cute and semi-aggressive Barbary macaques. Exit the cable car, and there they are, like a blast of hot air. Despite my experience managing these interactions (snow macaques in Arashiyama, Kyoto; green vervet monkeys, St. Kitts), I was somewhat concerned. Thankfully, the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society (and in particular, its ape management (literally) division) had the situation under control. 

Much has been written on various aspects of work, some titles more satisfying than others. Drive (Pink) is somewhat useful, highlighting the need for autonomy, flow (coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychology, with a last name even longer than mine), and intrinsic motivators. Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943) is interesting as well, with, as you might recall from freshman psychology, self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, and, proceeding toward the base, esteem, love and belonging, safety, and physiological factors. After more than a year of pandemic purgatory (and, of course, frontline workers have had it a lot worse), one cannot help but to think hard about work, its purpose, optimal working conditions, motivation, opportunity costs, when retirement might make sense, when I might visit the Costa del Sol again (hopefully, before retirement), and then subjecting various theories to all manners of jobs, including the rather unique management role on Gibraltar. Unsurprisingly, the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a triad of articles (e.g., After a century of five-day weeks, how about four?) on the new look of work. As for me, my approach has become probably even more functional.  

Saturday was gorgeous, one of those perfect fall days. Unfortunately, we had to hit the road again, for a five-hour drive to Madrid, the terminus of our Spanish vacation. 

Comments welcomed.