Drove all day. Seriously. Left around 9 a.m. and got to Eskoriaza, a small town about an hour drive away from Bilbao, around 5 or 6 p.m. The drive. Was in short. Long. haha ironic word usage there. Pretty sure we only stopped for bathroom breaks and some diesel. It was really cool seeing the landscape change so drastically from desert in the south with ridiculously hot weather, to rolling mountains and forests in the north with cooler, rainier temperatures. The rain clouds just appeared out of nowhere when we went through the first mountain pass. We stayed at a house in the countryside. It was all brand new, the owners, Ani and Alex, had bought the house 10 years ago as an old, abandoned, caved-in house. They started from scratch and made it into a beautiful hotel. Super clean and everything was very tasteful. Ani had another job, so she was gone for a large part of the time. She spoke English, but Alex did not. So I acted as translator for him and my parents throughout our 3 day stay there. Good practice to say the least. haha. So we just hung out there for the night and Alex made us dinner. Salad, steak, olives, bread, etc. Yum! very good steak.
View from our room
Bilbao bound today! Had breakfast at the hotel with fresh squeezed orange juice. my favorite :) We drove on the million toll roads to get in there and found some parking. Our first stop was the Guggenheim museum. Suuuuper cool building if I do say so myself. The main artist they were displaying inside was really neat. His name is David Hockney and he's a famous painter from England. Some of the modern art was almost disturbing I wont lie, but there was a really neat piece of art made with gigantic pieces of iron called "the wave" I think. You got to explore the spirals and stacks the artist made in that piece because it was that big. There is also a really cool dog sculpture outside the museum covered in a variety of bright and bold colored flowers. It was really hot in Bilbao that day. Dad wanted to head over to the old part of the town next to see the cathedral, so we walked the few kilometers it was away. There was a bridge we went over that looked a lot like some of the modern ones in Valencia. There was a little international fair going on too. When we got to the cathedral we couldn't enter because it is closed to tourists on Sundays. So we walked around and got some bakery treats while waiting for a decent time to go get Pintxos :) They are like Spanish tapas (little servings of food, kind of like appetizers) but they are the Basque version with a slice of bread and toppings on top with toothpicks through them. They are all at the bar and you grab a plate, grab the ones you like, and then the waiter will charge you according to the number of toothpicks you have in total. We ate a few good ones and thought we would go to some other places, but ended up just heading back to the hotel. It had been a long day of exploring for sure.
Bubbles!
Puppy!!
(Photos for this day courtesy of my father, since I guess I forgot to upload mine on my laptop!)
Monday, June 18, 2012
Leisurely took our time to leave Eskoriatza. Had breakfast and talked with Alex about Idaho (We were the first Americans to stay at their place since they opened up in February) and he talked about Basque culture. After that, we headed off to San Sebastian. Yeee. My friend Alberto here told me that San Sebastian was his favorite place and that I had to make sure to go there. It only took us a few hours in the car and then we just picked a parking garage and walked down by the port to eat some lunch, aka more pintxos and tapas!! We stuffed ourselves at one place and had a thing called mosto, which is just grape juice with a fancy name haha. We also met a family there from Soda Springs that was vacationing there for a few days!! What a small world. My dad was wearing a Tetons shirt, so the lady asked where we were from. Crazy man.
Did a little shopping after we filled up on lunch, they had some pretty neat stores. We wandered over to the port and walked down to the beach. There were tons of fish you could see in the sea! It was only about 65 or 70 degrees our and really overcast, so it wasn't good weather to go swimming. Sad day. Got some sand for me and then walked back to some more stores to buy some stuff. We stopped and had churros with hot chocolate, since I had been raving and ranting to my mom how much more delicious their hot chocolate here is. Yum.
And then we were off! To San Juan de Luz, just across the French border from San Sebastian. Got to our hotel, dude didn't speak much English. And. our hotel was above a restaurant! Ha! It was a really small town, and we were only 200 meters from the beach or less, Dad and I didn't feel too well, all that rich food had made our stomachs a little queasy, so we took a walk down to the beach and around the little downtown they had. Walked past an amazing chocolate store that had sculptures made of chocolate. Sweet! Mom saved me from walking into some dog crap. It was quite hilarious as she suddenly jerked me away from it. All the onlookers were laughing so much. I thought a car was going to hit me or something the way Mom reacted. hahaha. You guys probably didn't need to hear that, but it was freaking hilarious after the fact. Saw the sun set behind some clouds that made the sky light up in a pretty pink. Then we walked back to the hotel to get some shut eye.
San Sebastian
San Juan de Luz
Chocolate!
Sunset :)
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