Monico Family Travels

For my ‘pre- birthday’ James took me for a romantic weekend to Buenos Aires.  We took flight from the country (in our muddy ute) off to town on Friday morning, and enjoyed a day of hygienic waxing and cell phone service shops, interspersed with glasses of Mendoza’s best sparkling.  We stayed in a gorgeous hotel and had an amazing and iconic view of BA from our room:

We eeked out the evening by watching a movie, then going out for dinner at 10:30pm (for once there were other guests in the restaurant with us!), and then hitting a local bar in BA’s equivalent of Belgravia.  It was posh, noisy, served mega strong cocktails, and reminded us why we don’t really go ‘out out’ any more….

On Saturday James had arranged us a private street art tour around La Boca.  We saw tonnes of new artists vs Palermo, and enjoyed the stories behind the pictures which are much more politically driven.

The actual day of my birthday was wonderful and full of surprises:

Tea and a card in bed from Emily

which led into a special breakfast, also courtesy of Emily:

And a gorgeous card and scented candle from Bella:

We have a ‘no school on birthdays’ rule for the trip, so in the morning ‘uted’ down to the clubhouse, played some tennis and had a swim in the gorgeous 25M pool.

And then more surprises, in the form of a dead frog

and a live one rescued again by Beanie Bot……

Lunch was a perfect chicken salad and crisp white wine, on the terrace, on a beautifully sunny day, all laid out by the girls – it doesn’t get more idyllic than that!

Our afternoon treat was our first family polo lesson…….well we did a quick circuit to prove we could all ride, learned the ‘forehand’ in about 20 mins, then played a match for about 40 minutes which got surprisingly heated (or may be not that surprising….).

And resulted in some blisters:

So one of my birthday treats each year is that the girls let me ‘do’ their hair, however I like, so I indulged myself with some French Plaiting.  The cherry on the cake however this year was the removal of James’s mullet.  I exacted some wifely revenge by leaving a rats-tail which amused us all for a few days!

Dinner was a 3-course treat for which I lifted not a finger, but rather my glass many times with crisp G&T followed by champagne, then delicious Malbec with the tender lomo that James lovingly cooked on the Asado.  Huge thanks to James for cooking / orchestrating, masterminding, to the girls for baking and decorating the cake, and to Rob for a beautiful table, and some sooty sous-cheffing!

The final hurrah was my gift from James who was Topsy the Arab (named due to her affinity with spinning, but actually called Safira) who he rented for a week for me.  She was very very pretty, un poco nerviosa, but charmed us all, especially when she learned to drink from the hosepipe when I washed her down after sweaty rides.  What a brill prezzie from the BEST husband.