This story was written by my niece, Heather Mikulski. I included it on my blog because it is a "travel" story with Barbie, only told from a different point of view. Thank you, Heather for sharing your story and allowing it to be used on my blog.
Someone's at the Door by Heather Mikulski
At the end of 2017, I moved to Barcelona, Spain, for a new job and
a new adventure. I was super excited about the opportunity and my family was
too. As you can imagine, Barcelona is a popular destination, and it wasn’t long
before I had my first visitors! In the spring of 2018, Aunt Gladys, my dad’s sister, and her friend
Barb came to visit. They were both in their 70’s but age didn’t slow them down.
They were excited and ready for the adventure.
Barcelona is a city that is full of people, culture, amazing food,
history, and life! Something is always going on and I wanted my visitors to
experience it all. Even when I was working, my aunt and her friend were out and
about, exploring all the wonders of the city. As great as it is, the city can
also be very busy. I can remember my aunt telling me that “it seems like at
every pedestrian crossing the light was always green, so we never had a minute
to stop and catch our breath. We were always on the move; "getting our steps
in”. I decided that maybe my aunt and her friend might like to get out of the
bustling city, see a new place, and have a little leisure time. This gave me
the idea to take a small trip. I did my research and decided that it would be a
surprise for my visitors.
We took a long weekend trip to a little coastal town in Costa
Brava called Tossa de Mar. It was the first time visiting this beautiful
medieval town for all three of us and we were excited. After a short hour and a
half bus ride, we arrived in the little village of just over 5,000 inhabitants.
There were many narrow and windy streets packed with local boutique shops and
restaurants.
We were in search of our hotel, Hotel Diana, and we put our trust
into google maps to guide the way. With luck, we arrived at the hotel and were
able to check into our room, which was one of the rooms on the top floor with a
private terrace overlooking the sea. The room was perfect, a good size,
centrally located, quiet and it had three beds…well almost. Two single beds and
a sofa bed.
The first night I took the sofa bed, wanting to make sure my
guests were comfortable. It was okay…not that it wasn’t comfortable, but being
5’8”, I was just too tall for this Spanish designed sofa bed. My feet hung off
the bottom of the bed from my calves down! Between my tossing and turning and
my roommates getting up and down in the middle of the night for the bathroom,
it was a pretty sleepless night. My aunt Gladys, being super nice, said to me
the next day that she would take the sofa bed that night. I was thankful and
relieved.
After a day of exploring, walking the streets to the medieval part
of the town, and enjoying the fresh seaside air, as well as plenty of local
Spanish food, we were all exhausted. I was excited for bed. That day the
temperature was warm and partly cloudy, but the night was cooler with fresh air
coming in off the sea. We decided that we would open our terrace door this
night to let the fresh air into our room. Before long, we were all sleeping
soundly, including me, in a bed that was just the right size.
Unbeknownst to me, during night my aunt’s friend, Barb, woke up to
use the bathroom and decided that she wasn’t really tired, so she was going to
sit on the terrace in moon light and listen to the rolling waves of the sea. A
short while later, Aunt Gladys also woke up to use the bathroom and before
coming back to bed she thought to herself that it was a little chilly in the
room, so she quietly closed the terrace door, crawled back in bed, and went to
sleep. Given that it was dark in the room, and she didn’t turn on the lights,
she was unaware that she had inadvertently locked her friend Barb outside on
the terrace. You see, in Spain, the terrace doors do not have handles on the
outside, only on the inside. It is impossible to open the door from the
outside.
Barb had heard the door close, but she didn’t think anything of it
because she wasn’t ready to come back to bed yet and thought she could open the
door when she was ready. Just like Gladys, she didn’t realize that the door
could only be opened from the inside. It wasn’t until a couple hours later that
it had started to rain and naturally, Barb wanted to come back inside. She
searched for the door handle and realized that she was locked out. So, she
started knocking lightly on the glass door trying to get her friend’s attention
but not so loud as to wake me. I was still sleeping at this point and had no
idea what was going on. Apparently, Aunt Gladys was woken up by the knocking,
but she didn’t know where it was coming from.
The next thing I know, I was woken up by Aunt Gladys. She was standing over top of me telling me “Get up; someone is knocking on the door. Someone is trying to get in.” In my grumpy and sleepy voice, I told her “Then go open the door!” She said, “No, you do it,” and next thing you know I am opening the main door to our room, and of course, no one is there.
I asked her where her
friend Barb was and that’s when we turned on the light and found her bed empty.
At this moment, I realized that Barb was locked outside on the terrace and Aunt
Gladys quickly ran over and opened the door. The laughing the ensued from the
downright hilarious situation was contagious, but I wasn’t having anything to
do with it. I was tired and grumpy, and all I wanted to do was to go back to
sleep.
I said, “we all need to go back to bed.” We quickly got re-settled, closed the terrace door, now that everyone was inside, and crawled back in our beds. As I am trying to get back to sleep, my two roommates couldn’t contain their laughter and little giggles could be heard on both sides of the room. I thought to myself, I am never getting any sleep. After a while they settled down, and just when I was about to drift off, Aunt Gladys suddenly said, “It’s hot in here.”
View from our hotel room
