Cadaqués

Carcassone

Mid-afternoon we arrived in the medieval fortress city of Carcasonne.  Our hotel, a fifteen-minute walk outside the old, double-walled cité, was a walkup with lumpy, rolling, funhouse floors, but it was clean, cheap, and well-located, and the owners were congenial, offering us one of their 2 free parking spaces.  Crossing L’Aude on the Pont Vieux we could see the massive crenellated walls stretching out to the right and left and imagine knights jousting before them.  It’s wonderful how, in Europe, you can travel in time as well as in space.  The vista mixed the romance of Sleeping Beauty castles with a reminder of how brutal life once was.  The rest of the day we wandered the streets and battlements, buying tee shirts for friends and a leather handbag for Frieda.  After dark, spooky torch-like lighting gave the place an eerie atmosphere, towering walls loomed out of black shadows.  We had a cassoulet for dinner, the local specialty, and then got lost trying to find our way out, stumbling into half-playful moments of trepidation as we imagined some knave or varlet lurking in the opaque shadows between the splashes of yellow light.    

 

It was a bright blue morning as we set off toward Perpignon, eventually exiting the toll highway at La Boubou and making our way on 2-lane roads through rolling vineyards toward Collioure, a resort on the coast once a hangout of the Fauve artists.  From there, we drove south.  The scenery was stunning but I had to keep my eyes on the narrow, twisty road.  Frieda was navigating and told me to stop in Banyuls Sur Mer, a seaside town about 10k. north of the Spanish border, where we had crepes at a place on the beach.  

A couple hours later we pulled into Cadaqués, a whitewashed town built into jagged black rocks and surrounded by mountains that, for me, carries a flavor of Greece.  I first visited it, briefly, in 1998 when Frieda, whose parents were born in Spain, was giving me the Grand Tour.   Her father was from Figueres, a town about 35k. inland that was also the birthplace of Dalí.  Her grandfather was Dalí’s drawing teacher, and her father and Dalí were childhood chums.  Much later, when she was a child, her family visited and Dalí, who was living in Cadaqués at the time, (or, more precisely, in Port Lligat, a kilometer away) sent a car to bring them to his house.  She still remembers how frightened she was by the huge (to an 8-year-old) stuffed bear looming just inside the front door, and her unease about the very odd man who was giving her a tour of his unusual home.  We returned in 2000 for a longer visit, exploring Dalí’s museum in Figueres (the definitive Dalí experience), as well as Gala’s Castle in Pubol.  We stayed in Cadaqués for 2 weeks on that trip, also exploring the little towns south to Tossa de Mar.  We even toyed with the idea of buying a pied-à-terre there.  Spain was still on the peseta then and everything was cheap.  But in the end we decided against it because we would’ve felt obligated to return every year and there were too many other places we wanted to go.  So instead we picked up a print of Dalí’s 1924 painting of a beach in Cadaqués, “Port Alguer,” and put it over our mantle. 

Port Alguer, 1924

We soon discovered that, aside from a favorite gelateria, everything we remembered was still there. In those days we had stayed at Playa Sol, and every morning after breakfast had gone for a swim from the little beach right in front of it. After drying in the sun, we’d walk down to the main town beach for beer and anchovy-stuffed olives and some chatting and people watching. When the olives couldn’t stave off hunger any longer, we’d walk back along the shore to our favorite restaurant, Ix!, for some paella, mussels in red sauce, or some other delectable comestible, before returning to the hotel for siesta. Toward evening we’d go for a stroll around town, maybe pausing for espressos, eventually stopping somewhere for tapas. All our favored haunts were still there. The only difference was more people; the town didn’t seem as laid back and sleepy as it once was. This impression was reinforced at a tapas place near the main beach where the road in front of the outdoor patio, unlike the old days, now swarmed with people. I tried the delicious navajas, a long, narrow clam, for the first time, and we also had some old favorites, like pimientos del patron, sardines, and bacala fritters.

Port Alguer, 2013

In the morning we picked up our old routine, heading for the beach nearest our hotel, which happened to be Port Alguer.  The beaches in Cadaqués are dark and pebbly, and the water is a dark, emerald green, but clear.  At first cold, it soon felt refreshing, and I was thrilled to swim in the Mediterranean again, a sea so full of history, the sea of Homer and Odysseus, the birthplace, cradle, and playpen of Western Civilization.  We dried in the sun before heading to the main beach for beer and olives, and on to Ix!.  The next day we varied the routine with a stroll over to Dali’s house after lunch.  It was closed so we couldn’t retour it, but the enchanted walk through the olive groves charmed us and reminded me again of Greece.  After siesta I bought Frieda a black leather vest.  

The following morning we took off for Barcelona via the main highway.  Frieda did an amazing job of navigating, better than a GPS, weaving through the city to our hotel at the top of La Rambla without a hitch.  I parked in a red zone while she registered and sent the bellhop out to take our luggage, and then she directed me to the Avis office near the Avenida Diagonal through a bewilderment of one-way streets.  We pulled into their garage at 12:59 and they slammed the door behind us for siesta.  From there we walked down Paseo de Gracia toward our hotel.  I marched past Casa Milá, but it jumped out of my peripheral vision.  That and Casa Batlló, a little farther along, are hard to miss, they’re both so startlingly unique.  We’d toured the first and seen the other Gaudí sights in 2000, when we were in Barcelona for nearly a week.  At the hotel we sampled the 24-hour buffet, taking the booty up to our room to eat on the balcony over La Rambla and watch the hordes of people swarming for Fiesta de la Merce.  

 

Cadaqués

 

We’d already noticed that people on La Rambla looked shabbier than they had on our last visit and on the way to dinner at Els Quatre Gats we noted homeless folk sleeping on door sills.  These were the first symptoms of the recession we’d seen; we hadn’t noticed it in Basque country.  Our waiter at the restaurant, who was Chilean, told us Spain hadn’t lived up to his hopes and he was thinking of going home.  Nevertheless, the restaurant, not cheap, was jammed, with no vacant tables. 

In the dim morning light we caught a bus at La Plaza de Catalunya and watched Barcelona slowly unpeel from its windows as it shuttled us out to Terminal 1.  It was hard to believe that in about 18 hours we would be 6,000 miles away and these buildings, these streets, indeed all that we had seen on this trip, would be just a dream.   

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.