Day 10: Cruising East Along the Northern Coast of Spain

Early this morning, we headed to the Santiago de Compostela train station and rented a car for our long drive to Bilbao. After multiple calls from the states to confirm that the car would indeed be an automatic transmission and that a gps device would be included, we were glad to find everything just as we had asked for, and we headed out of the city easily with blue skies before us.

Driving through the Galician countryside made us feel, corny as it sounds, happy to be alive. Lush, rolling hills dotted with fluffy sheep, idyllic, stone houses with laundry hanging in the sun, and blue skies hung with poofy, white clouds, greeted our every turn. We slipped our flamenco cd (the one we bought on the street in Granada) into the stereo, and snapped along to the music. (Most of today's pictures were taken through the window of a moving car...)

We left Santiago de Compostela at 10am, and after about 4 hours of easy driving along the N-634 (with a 15 minute break for Fanta Limon at a lovely country inn) we found ourselves in the coastal town of Gijon. We picked a crowded cafe in a sunny square for lunch, and sat down to one of the strangest meals we've had yet on this trip. I won't go into detail, but let's just say my first course involved rice and marinara sauce, and Jack's involved mushrooms... many many mushrooms.

It took us (and our gps) a while to figure our way out of Gijon, which gave us our first glimpse of the Cantabrian sea.

Finally moving onwards at around 4:30 pm, we hopped on the A-8 expressway which moved us much more quickly along this beautiful drive. The topography began to change dramatically, and soon, we found ourselves driving through the foothills of some pretty awe-inspiring peaks. I think these are part of the Picos de Europa, a popular national park.







Soon, we noticed that the signs were starting to display a new language, and realized that it was Euskarian, an ancient language dating back to Neolithic times, spoken by the Basque people. It is actually the oldest spoken language in Europe. The mountains also gave way to coastline, which would eventually lead us to the Bay of Biscay.


We finally made it into Bilbao at 7pm in the evening, found our hip hotel without any problem. Just a quick note about our little car... we rented a Citroen C4 which runs on diesel gas- totally awesome! More torque to the engine than a normal transmission, yet, incredibly gas efficient- we drove about 570 kilometers on half a tank of gas!


After resting for a bit, we took the incredibly easy to use and very modern metro to Casca Viejo, old town. As it turns out, very few pintxos (like tapas, but smaller, more like "bites") bars are open late on Tuesdays, so we limited ourselves to two, and nibbled a few pintxos at each. Jack tried the txakoli, which is a light white wine, special to the region, while I opted for the most delicious bottled water I can remember tasting... the Solan de Cabras. It's like drinking liquid crystal.

The dinner was light, but neither one of us was terribly hungry... besides, we had to save our appetites for a big eating kind of day in the Basque country side tomorrow...