The practical answer was probably no. But there are moments in life when value and cost stop being the same thing.

I imagined my birthday there. Volcanic landscapes. Whitewashed walls. Golden light spilling across stone floors. A quiet dinner for one. No expectations. No performance. Just the simple acknowledgment that I’ve survived another year and somehow emerged as someone slightly different.

Maybe that’s what I was paying for. Not the hotel.
The permission.

The permission to stop optimizing every decision and choose beauty because it matters.

Somewhere between planning the trip and living it, something unexpected happened. I stopped worrying about finding myself. The phrase had always bothered me anyway. As if some complete version of me was hidden somewhere waiting to be discovered.

Now I think the person I was looking for wasn’t waiting in Lanzarote. The trip wasn’t about finding him.

It was about finally making enough room to meet him.

But every time I added another stop, something felt off.
Too much movement. Too much logistics. Too much trying.

The trip became clearer when I started removing things instead. What remained was surprisingly simple.

Fuengirola. Lanzarote. Fuengirola.

A beginning. A middle. An ending.
A place to land.
A place to transform.
A place to return.

The irony is that the most expensive part of the entire trip ended up being the place I was least willing to compromise on. Hotel Palacio Ico wasn’t rational. At least not entirely. Every time I recalculated the budget, that number stared back at me like a challenge.

Do you really need this?

I thought I was planning a vacation.

What I was actually planning was a meeting. Not with a place. Not with a version of Europe I’d never seen before. With myself. The question started simply enough: Where should I go?

Portugal. Lisbon. Faro. Gibraltar. Granada. Lanzarote.

The conversation became less about destinations and more about what I was actually looking for after a year that felt like it had rearranged parts of me. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t searching for adventure. I wasn’t trying to maximize experiences or collect passport stamps.

I was trying to create enough space to hear myself again.

At first, I kept adding things. Another city. Another hotel. Another chapter. Lisbon became especially tempting. There was something romantic about ending the trip in a beautiful European capital, sitting in a rooftop bar and pretending I was the protagonist in a film.