A Reluctant Admission: A Nomos Tetra Watch Review

I think beaches, amongst travel locations, ways to relax, places to unwind, peaks for destination weddings, and centerstage for core memories made in childhood, are one trial away from consideration of voluntary torture.

They are a dry heat. This is much better than a humid heat but really, who wants to feel like a slowly rising pound cake? They are gritty. Coarse grains roosting in your eyelashes, grinding between your toes, sticking to every surface whether hot or cold, warm or dry. The sand acts as the postal service of the natural world. The water is, 77% of the time, a murky earth tone ranging from debatable brown to mild Chernobyl. And the times it's not, you’re still swimming in salt and sand (see: grit). You are increasing the risk of skin problems as your body screams at you to try to emulate the crabs digging their way towards relief. But instead, you're hoping your secondhand, desaturated rainbow colored family umbrella doesn’t get caught by that unusually strong gust you felt a moment ago. Where you have to bring so many comforts with you just to try to make it manageable: a water cooler, a towel, sun screen, flip flops, sunglasses, books, that turkey sandwich wearing lettuce like it's out of season but can still pull off palatable. You hope that you won't find anything in it (see: grit). And so on.

My wife was invited to Mallorca in the summer of 2022 by her job, a “workation” they called it. “Workation” is one of those new truncated words that doesn’t deserve to exist in concept or actuality. But everyone’s ancestor’s tracing back to the beginning of time would slap our hands in irritation if we passed up a proverbial “free meal”. 

Other than the Monty Python-esque mad dash to make it out of the country before everyone’s border’s closed in 2020, my wife, child, and I had never traveled anywhere as a unit. I had traveled across the US multiple times and had done a few stints overseas. My wife, on the other hand, was a world traveler, her passport a stamp collector’s dream. 

My child was almost two years old. 

So we were all accustomed to traveling in our own ways for years before undertaking our first attempt (the baby and I, anyway) to arrive somewhere relaxing.

The first part of the trip down to Mallorca was thankfully smooth. My wife rolled her eyes at me as we left the now defunct Tegel airport (hooray!) in Berlin. I had double wristed my loaned watches from Nomos that I absolutely would not let out of my sight. One, on the account for their safety. And two, as a way to constantly remind myself that a household name brand watch company had loaned me two (two!) watches to photograph. 

With no layovers or transfers, we took a straight shot over the water, into the Mallorcan airport, past the crowds that don’t know how to follow “walking in the correct direction” etiquette, and stepped out into that first breath of fresh Mallorcan air. 

I was hit with a smothering, damp down blanket to the face called “typical Mallorcan air” that, no matter how hard I clawed, would not come off until I was back in that same airport a week later. We looked to the ridgeline at our right, the sun on a collision course with their modestly sharp outlines, when we were assured that there was a shuttle bus that would take us to the rental car parking lot for a dollar. The company bragged it would get you to the parking lot in a minute.

The sun had crashed behind the mountains and was smoldering across the horizon, giving off feeble light. Eventually, after using broken English, German, Spanish, Danish, Danglish, and baby we finally gave up and called a taxi.

“See, it's an hour and a half later,” I told my wife, pointing with one wrist covered hand to the other, “That’s several minutes.”

She glared at me. The baby glared at me. The taxi driver glared at me. 

I stood unfazed, however, looking at my wrist. I’d had the Tetra for a few weeks up until that point having traveled to Lisbon a few weeks earlier. It was my first non-round timepiece where I’d thought a Cartier of some sort would hold that honor; in the world of watches, there were a few square or rectangular watches that really appealed to me (and 99% of the rest of us) in the Tank or the Santos. 

Nomos had loaned the blue Tetra to me specifically though as a part of their then latest releases. I was a little skeptical. It would be as if I had been eating apple pie all my life and then switched to cheesecake on a random Tuesday evening having read a motivational quote that same morning about experiencing new things. A dessert, yes, but wildly different. So as we dragged ourselves into the lobby of the rental center, it struck me as odd when I’d realized that the Tetra was on my non-dominant wrist; the one I look at the most often.

If I were capable of feeling shame, the caliber of which you find at 10:26 PM trying to fall asleep, I’m sure I would in the following case against me. However, I learned that same evening, already late by quite a large margin, that there was a Taco Bell less than three miles away from the airport. 

There are many American chains that made it to Europe, and in Berlin specifically, a few notable ones. Five Guys, for instance, a burger chain that had originated in my home state of Virginia, had somehow wandered over, found Germany good, and decided to extend its tourist visa indefinitely. But never a Taco Bell. Taco Bell tastes to me like college: swapping overnight shifts as a security guard for three tacos, bringing an ex-girlfriend to a franchise as a dinner date, etc etc. It tastes like comfort food and I won’t feel any more bad about that than other people have tried to make me feel for the past thirteen years. 

So, already behind schedule, I convinced everyone to make a detour. For burritos. And for the rest of our stay, we would make trips around the whole island (approximately 3600 km in size) from east to west, a two hour drive, for a taste of refried home.

Technically, we were also trying to wean the child off of breastfeeding to relax and calm her down for naps. The next best thing was to take our eco-friendly car and just wait for the inevitable gentle hills and soothing white noise of air conditioning to Muhammad Ali her to night-night. But we, the adults in the car, had to remain ever vigilant to the dangers of the road.

“Why…is that man biking in the middle of the day? In the middle of THE HIGHWAY??” I queried in a level tone to my wife, shooting my rhetorical bullet as a raised eyebrow at this hardcore enthusiast.

As a person who finds the crowns on watches and their various designs fascinating, I can’t really stand on the moral mountain of superiority for judging other hobbies. I can wonder about life choices that purposefully put one’s safety in jeopardy. And not even the aggressively intense kind, just normal, every day jeopardy. Like when you gamble against the last ten minutes of your alarm: could you wake up naturally and on time after just one more snooze? Maybe. Roll those dice, Nathan Detroit.

These people would bike at high noon, a notoriously bad time for training, on asphalt that threatened to melt them to slag if they stopped pedaling for even a moment. And they came specifically to Mallorca to do it. I’d theorized they were training for any and all conditions, including vehicular manslaughter.

“They come from all over, honey,” my wife told me, steering our car away from the spandex thrill seeker, “But yeah…mostly from Germany.”

This is a happenstance or cliche that I wouldn’t have picked up until I’d traveled a bit more. Germans love Mallorca. Always there no matter the time of year, it's their premiere vacation, holiday, celebration, evasion from police hidey-hole, and all around preferred destination. I understand it; living in Berlin from November to April is bleak. Gray skies for the entirety of those months. So coming to blue skies and seas makes sense. Coming to train for a bike marathon? Still, sort of makes sense. 

I maintained the hard eye contact with the biker, having picked up the habit while living in Berlin for a while (you stare openly and without abandon at other people, like rival jaguars but without the purring). But, even then in that staring contest, I had never really considered or accepted that my blue-blooded American sensibilities could or would be in tune with radical Germans’. But I too woke up and chose danger for my hobby on one particular day on that sun drenched island.

My wife, ever the planner, decided to take us to a picture-esque cove when she had a moment to herself out side of the work vacation. We were supposed to hang around the beach with the child, eating ice cream and just playing around by the shoreline. But as we were walking along the boardwalk, she spotted a rough path off to our right that led through some vegetation. We followed the sightline and figured it led to the cliffs acting as the gateway of the cove. She suggested I go up this out-of-the-way path to get a few shots of the cliffs and landscape. I had dutifully taken my Nikon with me to capture baby splashes in the tide so it made sense. I paused, considered, and commented that it might be a great place for watch shots as well. She slipped into the tired, patient silence I’d come to know as, “Please don’t talk to me about watches anymore and just go…”

I was dressed for the beach: beach shoes (yes shoes, I don’t believe in the Gospel of Birkenstock), cotton shorts, a thin shirt, and no hat as there were plenty of umbrellas for me to hide under. I hadn’t even applied sunscreen yet because I thought I would go up, snap a few shots, and head back down. Instead, my 8-ball on a pair of shoulders with zero protections went into a cloudless sky with a merciless sun gleefully rubbing its flares together at my approach, and thought, “The lume from the Tetra is going to look so good later”.

I was right, of course. It did look good. It looked even better against its OEM brown leather strap. For my watches, I actually prefer leather straps, even in “find a rock to sunbathe on and remain motionless” degree weather. It's as comfortable as your worn-in running shoes. You slip it on and know you won't have to fuss with it. Which the Tetra had no problem accommodating. 

Again, I found myself appreciating the design to my surprise. Not that I didn’t like Nomos watches to begin with but I was surprised at how much I liked it. Visually, the Tetra didn’t cause as much of a dust up as I thought it would, at least as far as my wrist went. It was actually kind of…clean. Not in my aggressively wiping down the dial before a wrist shot kind of way. I mean the symmetry of the angles and the spacing hit me right in that sweet spot. It's a criteria that only now I can recognize as important to the timepieces I’m fond of: their dials need space to breathe. And I don’t mean completely minimalistic because there's a line where I struggle to figure out if the minute hand is pointing at 31 or 37. Just an aesthetically proportional spacing of indices, markers, design, and everything else. You can call me the third bear to a watch’s goldilocks; it’s fair.  

On the whole, I think it could and would easily pair with one of my suits as well as it was going with my dad hat and shorts. I was and am aware that the Tetra trends more on the classier sides, conjuring images of scotches, typewriters, and 3AM cigarette sessions. 

After slathering myself in aloe vera and lying completely still for the remainder of a day, my wife needed a longer break. She knew of a tiny town that I would consider off the beaten path that we could visit. Which, for a tourist-centric island meant nothing. But for me, with my terrible sense of direction and only seeing one vague sign about it, I thought it was a hidden gem: Valldemossa. Obviously it was a tourist haven but by the winding, twisting sandstone colored hills and valleys we drove through, it still felt like something we stumbled upon. Like one wrong turn and directions from an unhelpful local would’ve led us to miss it completely.

The town of Valldemossa nestled in between some rolling hills with no sign of water. You would think it would be horrible dry because of it but no. It was lush and somehow cool. Without a degree in geography or meteorology or or another physical based -ology, I couldn’t guess about breezes or whatever was going on but there in Valldemossa was not at all stifling. In a place with no air conditioning and nowhere to hide from the sun, we remained oddly unscathed, as if the Gods of Vacation had looked at a tired mother, a burnt toast father, and a baby in a cute sunhat and decreed, “They’ve been through enough…”

What was stifling about the village was the cats. Cats, understandably, are very anti-tourist. Where tourists fall on their Displeasure List remains a mystery but their boiling hate was abruptly hip checked by a man squatting in front of them, positioning a watch in front of their paws. I looked deep into their island cat eyes and the eyes stared back.

They blinked first.

Unshockingly, the Tetra was easy to photograph, whether that was on a cliff, in a valley, in direct sunlight, or the hazy shadows of a cozy alley. The deep blue dial helped bridge that gap of absorbing the glare without reflecting it right back at the lens. And even next to a rock (or a cat) it seemed to subtly make every possible noun in the surrounding area rise to its level of class. Even some guy working on some degree of sunburn.

But, unlike a lot of tourist places, Valldemossa felt lived in. Yes, all tourist places are lived in and you can see it if you get off the main streets for a bit. But this place was very upfront about it which I found refreshing (I, however, remained unrefreshed as I read and reread a menu that claimed a bottle of coke was eight euros). 

The lazy back alleys, the flower boxes outside of the windows. Someone's cat hissing at me from under a van in a back alley. It genuinely felt like, yes, their main business was tourists. But I imagined when the sun went down, the streets came to life with that authentic Mallorcan vibe that stayed elusively out of reach; that ethereal sense that the island was holding a little bit of its true self from the tourist. A closely guarded secret of the true islanders. Not that they were manufacturing how calming it was to be there or the hospitality offered was anything less than perfect. I’d know, they dealt with German tourists year round (which is a shot I’m willing to take but a story for another time). 

But if that's the way it was, so be it. Something worth guarding that much has to be special. I could understand that.

We wound up going back to Valldemossa one more time because we loved it so much. My wife eventually succumbed to the island's charms to let your more reckless, danger driven desires to the front. She noticed I was trying to frame the Tetra as a wrist shot with the backdrop of Valldemossa as we sped away. My wife had never put my life in danger once except for that day: she urged me to hang out of the window, as to not frame the shot with the car’s, and take a few shots. While the Gods of Vacation sighed and infused my seatbelt’s fibers with a little more sturdiness, I held myself halfway out of the window with a square watch on my wrist and the thrill of capturing a place that for both of us, would become our mental retreats when we were stuck in meetings. Which just goes to show you that this place was worth dying for. Not worth spending eight dollars on a bottle of coke for but the views were phenomenal.

I would’ve liked to had stayed in a hotel solely in the village, that’s how much I enjoyed myself. And then later, that same feeling extended in appreciation of the whole island. Like the Tetra, I’d found myself surprised at how much I ended up liking Mallorca; how I could’ve stayed for another week, even.

But as we drove through the winding path, skipping between shafts of golden beams and lazy shadows of afternoon light, the child was settling in for her nap. 

And I was hungry for a burrito.