(Aside: Up until about twenty minutes ago I had developed a new love for the simplicity of using Notepad to write with. I was 90% done with this blog post when my computer decided to die before I’d hit save.

So, suffice it to say, one serious rage session later, I’ve ditched simplicity and am now back on Word. WHERE THEY HAVE DOCUMENT RECOVERY.)

Summer has a tendency to inspire promise: impending adventures, previously unfulfilled personal sojourns imminently poised to become life’s Next Big Thing. Every year it’s like hearing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten for the first time all over again and I always feel like I can take over the world. This year, I settled for kicking June off with my first trip to Spain.

Three days in Madrid saw me reunited with Jaime and Edu, who along with helping me begin a life-long obsession with jamón, showed me first-hand all of the corners of the city that made them fall in love with Spain in the first place. I even snagged a true local Madrid experience when Edu’s family was gracious enough to host me for the duration of my stay. (In fact, if I can avoid hotels for the majority of my European adventures, all the better. Nothing beats a local neighborhood experience.) The Luchena Ruizs put on a stunning spread of Spanish food all three nights I stayed there, we ventured into the city and drank cheap delicious wine and ate free fabulous tapas late into the warm Spanish evenings, and I spoke a lot of terrible, terrible Spanish (I exaggerate. Mostly I just said “gracias” very poorly). What more can you ask of an early summer Spanish vacation?

If you said “see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time” then you are SPOT on, my friends. So after saying farewell to the Luchena Ruiz clan, I hopped onto a train to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia, and it did not disappoint.

My friend Suzy met me in there, and after spending our first evening exploring downtown and enjoying the tapas and wine (and gelato and bats) there included, the following three days were filled with sunshine-y, sunscreen-y bliss, parked on the beach watching utterly comfortable Spaniards lazing around La Malvarosa and diving into the Mediterranean.

I had a moment back when I visited Arundel and stood in the same rooms as Empress Matilda, a moment of that sort of knowing and feeling that Natasha Bedingfield so shamelessly inspires. I had another one when I visited the Tower of London and stood in the same rooms where Stephen, Henry, Eleanor, and Richard had, in turn, stood.

Standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean was another one of those moments.

This was the same sea that the Ancient Greeks sailed. That the Normans sailed. That Empress Matilda looked out over before she ever returned to England. That Eleanor of Aquitaine covered when she joined her husband on crusade.

I like to think that all ancient places and landscapes have their own energy, invariably thrumming at their own frequency. The Pacific Ocean is somehow fiery; it’s confident, endless, and always crashing. This sea was calm. It lacked the kinetic, impressive, white-capped waves that crashed along the entire breadth of the California coastline, the kind of waves I’d grown up with my entire life. And this water’s energy was different, less obvious, and buried deep. It was huge and capable of much but burned itself out over thousands of years, happy now, for the most part, to sit and be admired until it saw otherwise necessary.

While swimming in that calm, feeling that thrum, I had the moment. I knew that my next adventure had to be in Italy.

About a week ago, I was doing some casual online research on the Normans. (Any time spent substantiating my strange Norman obsession is time well spent. Obviously.) Now, most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror was fairly effective and kind of changed the entire course of English history so, I mean, it makes sense. But something that’s less talked about (she writes, as if you generally run into people discussing the Norman Conquest whenever you’re grabbing coffee at Starbucks) is the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the eventual Kingdom of Sicily that they then ruled for a decent chunk of medieval history.

If you grab a map and take a look at the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, you’d see that it included all of Calabria. Also known as the region of Italy from which my great grandfather immigrated in 1912, from whom I, one hundred years later, claimed my dual citizenship so I could move back here. When I saw that, I thought to myself, “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here, but MAYBE, SOMEWHERE, way back in my Italian ancestry, I MIGHT BE NORMAN!”

And I am fully aware that that is useless, irrelevant, ridiculous information that changes absolutely nothing about who I am as a person and in no way effects the present. But the romantic half of me – which wields a hefty amount of power these days – can’t get past it. It’s that part of me that walked into the Mediterranean, looked out across the ancient water and thought, “Y’know what? Italy, you’re next.”

History is just so astounding.

There’s one more uniquely Kathy moment that happened in Valencia, and I’m quite sure I’ll have this one in my list of all-time favorites for years to come.

Suzy and I stayed at an Airbnb in historic old town Valencia, in a 1930’s era apartment decorated by an exceptionally hipster pair of local Valencian guys that respectively moonlighted as a DJ and a photographer. One of the reasons I picked the place was that it had a tiny balcony that opened onto Carrer de Sant Vincent Martir (on which, I pictured, Suzy and I would drink black coffee and eat breakfast each morning before heading out to the beach. On which, unsurprisingly, we never did.)

The last night we were in the city, Suzy fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow. I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the main room, threw the balcony shutters open, and listened to this late-night, outdoor concert that happened to be going on in the street below. It was a local high school band and after a few songs and a bit of nostalgia, I decided to pop in my headphones and watch an episode of Vikings until I got sleepy.

My headphones were such that even with the open shutters, I couldn’t hear the concert over Ivar the Boneless being obnoxious and horrifying.. That was, until, during a quiet moment of the show, when I thought I heard something familiar coming from the street below.

I threw down my head phones, ran outside, and sure enough, the band was playing a song I hadn’t heard in years. But the years hadn’t changed how blood-stirring it was, nor how impossibly strong the memories attached to it were. It was the opening overture from the (notoriously hammy and complete classic) 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it immediately took me back to being a kid, watching it with my sisters, seeing the camera pan across the Bayeux Tapestry, having never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry or having any concept of what the Norman Conquest was.

It was a moment of pure magic. Nearly midnight, in the balmy streets of Valencia, in the house of total strangers, twenty-nine years old and still a shamelessly believer in life-changing epiphanies, feeling my heart thrum when the French horns kicked in. There’s not a feeling like it.

Usually coming home from vacation is a struggle, but I left Spain feeling almost impossibly fulfilled. Toss in some very exciting work things on the horizon – which I’ll share more about if and when they come to pass – and this June has been everything I’ve come to expect from summer.

(Considering the season doesn’t really even start for two more days, I’m feeling pretty good about it.)