Basque Country

Maman

Getting to Europe from California has always been a trial, but lately the ordeal of the journey has begun to outweigh the pleasure of the arrival for me.  I’ve seen the sights I really wanted to see, sometimes more than once, so at this stage I either return to someplace I liked before or visit someplace new in which I have only a middling interest.  For the first trip to Europe since our wintery sojourn in Venice last year we decided to do both: return to Spain, a country we hadn’t visited since 2000, to go back to a little town on the Costa Brava called Cadaqués that’s particularly dear to us, and for something new add the Basque Country, a part of Spain that lies north of Madrid, on the Atlantic (the Bay of Biscay), which I had only a modest interest in seeing.  To get there we first had to endure a 10 hour flight to London, a 3 and a half hour flight to Madrid, plus another hour flight to Bilbao and all the airport residence making the connections.  By the time we arrived on a gloomy, drizzly Monday evening, we had been awake for 30 hours and were fried, but we still had to catch a bus to the Guggenheim museum and drag our luggage through the drizzle across the Nervion River to our hotel on the opposite side, near the Calatrava pedestrian bridge.  

The Matter of Time

In the morning we walked farther down, away from the museum, to the Casca Viejo, the old town, ducking into a café for some Spanish ham with coffee when the drizzle turned to rain.  When it let up, we headed back toward the museum, crossing over the soaring auto bridge and climbing down the catwalks.  Fog was rolling across the shallow pond at the rear of Frank Gehry’s fantastic building and under the high arches of the legs of “Maman,” Louis Bourgeois’ Spider sculpture, as we approached.  We lingered in the atrium, where Frieda wanted to savor the complex intersecting curves of the interior, before entering the gallery containing Richard Serra’s monumental steel plate constructions collectively referred to as “The Matter of Time,” though “The Matter of Space” felt more appropriate as, walking through them, I felt the physical space around me pulling and stretching and twisting like taffy.   Nothing else measured up to them, although Frieda was fond of Jeff Koons “Puppy” out front, which is certainly playful in the mode of Dali.  For convenience we had lunch in the cafeteria upstairs.  We couldn’t pick up our rental car until 4 o’clock as Avis was closed for siesta.  When we got there we discovered we would not get the Audi A3 we’d been promised, but instead a Fiat 500L 1.3 liter diesel.  I was rather disappointed, but half the cars on the road in Europe are diesels now.  Diesel fuel is cheaper than gas there and they get better mileage than gas cars.  Between the cost of fuel ($7/gal. for gas and $6/gal. for diesel) and the many toll roads, it’s expensive to drive in Europe.  I declined the GPS at $15/day extra yet we somehow made it back across town to pick up our luggage at the hotel and hit the road to San Sebastian.   

The front of the museum with Puppy

San Sebastian, Donostia in Basque, was a retreat for Spanish royalty in the 19^th century.  It boasts a spectacular crescent beach called La Concha fronted with mansions reminiscent of the palazzos lining the Grand Canal in Venice and Atlantic waves suitable for surfing (which Spanish royalty, alas, did not do).  The waves and the water temperature make it less suitable for swimming than the Mediterranean, not that we were tempted, given the continuing inclement weather that closely resembled that in Bilbao.  The Basque Country is the wettest, greenest part of Spain, otherwise a pretty dry land.  It’s also famous for its food, and the old town of San Sebastian is full of pintxos bars where the art of Spanish tapas is taken to the highest level.  Every inch of the bar surface is covered with plates of different snacks in colorful profusion.  You order short beers called cañas, or wine poured from a height so as to aerate it, called txakoli, and then grab what you want, wiping your mouth with a paper napkin that you drop on the floor.  It’s all run on an honor system where, before you leave, you tell the barkeep what you had and pay up.  You’re supposed to remember it all so it’s best to move on before having too many different items.    

San Sebastian from our hotel balcony

The morning dawned still drizzly, so we took the car north, into France, to see Biarritz, an elegant little town where French royalty used to summer back in the 19^th century, and then worked our way south through St Jean de Luz and Hondarribia, on and off drizzle all the way.  We had sandwiches from a street vendor in the former for lunch, and then strolled the sturdy seawall that protects the heart of the town from oceanic incursions.  In the latter we ascended to the upper town for some wine and cheese in Charles V’s castle, now an expensive parador.  From there we took a scenic road, a narrow country lane where we first encountered wild horses grazing alongside, then a herd of sheep meandering across it, before emerging onto a more substantial highway.  Back in San Sebastian we returned to Parte Vieja.  This time we had a list of bars recommended by Rick Steves, but discovered they were all filled with Americans and no better, in some cases not as good, as the bars we had chosen by whim the night before.  When we emerged from the last it was pouring rain so we took a taxi back to the hotel. 

Biarritz

Our last day in San Sebastian we explored the Gros district, meandered down to Zurriola Beach, the prime surfer hangout, and ate churros from a street vendor.  In the evening we made our way back to Parte Vieja and bar hopped to the tune of our own whims again, leaning toward the places full of locals.  This time we ordered the hot pintxos from the chalkboard menus posted.  As everything was listed in Basque, we had no idea what we were eating.  Frieda suspected one dish featured bull testicles, but they all tasted great.  To finish we returned to a place we’d discovered the first night called La Viña and had some amazing cheesecake, their specialty. 

   

By morning the rumor that the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain had been dispelled: it falls mainly along the Atlantic coast, where we were. So we headed north, into France, and east, toward the Mediterranean. Although it was still drizzling slightly when we set off, we gradually drove out of it. As patches of blue began to break through the cloud cover while we blew across southern France at 140 kph on a wonderfully open toll road, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” blasting on the stereo, a sense of exhilaration and freedom overtook me, the kind of feeling that started to make the trip seem worth it.