Everything I Thought I Wanted From Spain

And What the Heat, the Solitude, and Five Days Away Actually Taught Me

We found a McDonald’s before we found our bearings. Jet-lagged, bags still in hand, and starving. Spanish McDonald’s, for what it’s worth. We ate it gratefully, while driving to our apartment at gone midnight, and I felt absolutely no shame about any of it.

By the time we reached the apartment, it was 2 am. The kind of arrival where you don’t unpack. You just fall, although I had to clean a bit as my brother had turned our home away from home into a man’s den.

I had a vision for this trip. I want to be honest about that, because the gap between the vision and what actually happened is where everything interesting lives.

In my head, I had planned solo mornings. A visit to Jardí Botànic Marimurtra, Portugal de la Costa Brava, sunrise on the beach. Quiet hours at Castillo de San Juan with just me, the light, and whatever thoughts chose to arrive. I had imagined cooking a simple meal from whatever was fresh at the market, eating it slowly on the balcony while everyone else was still sleeping. I had imagined going to bed early, rising early, having those long unhurried hours that feel like the whole point of going somewhere.

None of it happened.

The heat made its position clear on day one. Thirty-three degrees of absolute certainty. The kind of heat that doesn’t ask permission; it simply arrives and reorganises everything around itself. Sightseeing became theoretical. The balcony became uninhabitable by ten in the morning. The beach, which I had imagined at sunrise, quiet and golden, was, by any other hour, simply a furnace with sand.

And we were four people in a studio apartment, which is its own particular adventure. I love my family. I also, at one point, claimed I needed to clean and mop, specifically so that everyone would leave for an hour and I could have the apartment to myself. I mopped with great purpose and considerable relief. I am not even slightly sorry about this.

The solitude, when it came, arrived in pockets. A stolen hour in the afternoon with the AC humming and the curtains half-drawn against the white Spanish light. An early morning before anyone else was awake, sitting quietly with nothing in particular to do. These small gaps, accidental, unscheduled, barely earned, turned out to be where the whole trip actually happened. Not the sightseeing. Not the restaurants. Not the beach.

The quiet.

And in the quiet, I found myself doing what I always do when the noise drops away.

Thinking about what I actually want. Not what I should want. Not what looks good on a holiday photo or makes for an easy conversation. What I genuinely, privately, quietly crave. And the answer, every single time, in every accidental moment of stillness, was exactly the same.

Solitude. A lot of it. A kitchen with good produce in it. Long walks that go nowhere urgent. Simple meals eaten at my own pace. Cool air. Green things. Quiet mornings that belong entirely to me.

It’s not a complicated vision. That’s what struck me most, sitting there with Spain blazing outside. The life I want is not elaborate. It doesn’t require much. It just requires me to keep choosing it, even when, especially when, everything else is loud.

This was also the first time I had gone away without my laptop. I want to mark that, because a year ago (and all the years before) it would have felt impossible. The laptop was, in ways I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time, my security object. My proof that I was still showing up, still building, still present in my own life even when everything else felt uncertain.

Leaving it at home felt like a small act of trust in myself. And I managed. Not just managed, I was fine. Better than fine. The world did not fall apart. The work did not disappear. And I discovered something I half-suspected but needed to feel in my body to actually believe: the not-posting, the not-creating, the not-being-visible for a few days, none of it undoes what you’ve built. It just asks you to trust that it’s there.

I do not post every day because I must. I post when I have something real to say. And there is a significant difference between those two things. I think I know it more clearly now than I did before I left.

Five days away, and here is what I came home knowing:

I will not travel somewhere hot again. Heat and I have come to a mutual understanding: we are not for each other.

I will not take a trip where I cannot cook my own meals. A kitchenette is not a luxury. For me, it is the difference between feeling at home and feeling vaguely unsettled for the duration.

I love woodlands. Highlands. Mountains. Lakes. The kind of landscape that is cool and quiet and doesn’t ask anything of you except your presence. That is where I rest. Not a beach at thirty-three degrees. A trail through damp trees, yes. A shoreline at fifteen degrees with a flask of something hot, yes. But not this.

I would rather travel alone or with Khushi for a city break to somewhere we can actually explore, than navigate the compromises of group travel, where everyone’s version of a good holiday is fundamentally different. That is not a criticism of anyone. It is simply an honest reckoning with what I actually need.

And perhaps most quietly, most importantly, I came home understanding that I am my home. Not the apartment in Blanes, not the studio with the AC and the too-close quarters. My home is the quality of attention I bring to my own life. The morning ritual. The bureau. The chai made exactly right. The decision to eat slowly, to wake early, to protect the mornings. I carry all of that with me. I took it to Spain. I brought it back.

Yesterday afternoon, we landed in the UK to find Britain doing its own impression of summer, which I was not emotionally prepared for. We now have two fans (Thank God!). This is my entire survival strategy, and I am fully committed to it.

But there is an exhale that only happens when you walk through your own front door after days away. I felt it the moment I walked in. The particular relief of familiar things. The bureau. The quiet. The life I have built, waiting exactly where I left it.

In November, I am taking myself to an off-grid cabin for a few nights. Just me, and cool autumn air, and long afternoon walks, and watercolour painting, and the radio, not podcasts, not audiobooks, just music and voices and the ordinary sounds of being alive without an agenda.

I’m already looking forward to it way more than I did Spain, which tells me everything I need to know about the woman I am now and the kind of life she actually wants.

Kiran x

Shacks Holiday