It’s been almost two months since I’ve been back from my trip to Barcelona, Tangier and Madrid. The most common question people ask when they ask about the trip is, “What was the best thing you did?”

Which obviously is an impossible question to answer! The trip through Ace Camps Travel was outstanding and like nothing I’ve ever done before. I normally travel as cheaply as possible so to be in really nice hotels and be so well taken care of was a totally different experience for me. If you have the opportunity to go on an Ace trip, I highly recommend doing so. Our guide through the trip was Camila Loew, a foodie extraordinaire who runs Sobremesa (I highly recommend getting a copy of her new cookbook, The Sobremesa Cookbook!). Sobremesa translates to "table-top," or "at the table," and Camila told us, to the Catalans, it signifies the time at the table after the meal when everyone is hanging out, chatting, debating (Probably smoking too. Man, people in Spain smoke a lot!).

Our group did a lot of this. We spent so much time at the table. We got to know each other and we had great conversations. I had convinced myself before the trip there would be a bunch of influencers on it, so I was delighted when I arrived and found out I was being a crazy person, per usual. One morning at the hotel, during breakfast, we started talking about the one book everyone must read.

This list is from that discussion (we also discussed recent reads, so I added those to this list as well):

A Fine Balance by Mistry Rohinton

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

The Overstory by Richard Powers

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

The Xenogenesis Series by Octavia Butler

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

And this brings me to my favorite part. Not only did we eat at amazing restaurants and I learned to love vermouth, but, I also had the best strawberries and tomatoes of my life at L’Hort d'en Didac, a farm we toured and had lunch, and we did unexpected things like cook at Restaurant Semproniana while getting stern talkings to (lovingly, of course) from the chef, and we walked our way to lunch in a field of trees with sheep off to the left and the Pyrenees behind us, eating what we had foraged along the way with Iolanda Bustos and we had dinner ‘through the times’ in a funky artist studio where a giant cat named Norman scowled at us the entire time and we dipped our bread into candle wax as way of communion before the meal.

However, my favorite part was the sobremesa. All the sitting and talking we did. We hatched plans, we devised new businesses, we shopped for bridesmaid’s dresses. We learned about each other. Some of us have plans to see each other again. I hope to dog-sit all the dogs. But mostly, I hope to chat more and if there are amazing strawberries and tomatoes there too, all the better.