Itinerary

Here is our schedule through November 23rd, as of today, October 30th.

Happy Halloween! 🎃   👻 

Bilbao

We wandered a bit in this famous city today.

A visit to the Guggenheim Museum is mandatory. 

Tony with the spider.  Yech.  Or as my daughter, Jaime said, "Oh god why does anyone need a spider that big?"

But to make up for it, there was also a puppy covered in Flowers!

Just walking around the exterior of the museum is fascinating.

Tony was not the tallest guy there for once.

Across the street is pretty cool too.

We found some bonus street art as well.

A mural we got a partial photo of.

And an impromptu umbrella sculpture.

Next we board a cruise heading towards the Mediterranean and to the Red Sea.  Communication will be available on days we are in port, so we will check in as we are able.

Love ya, mean it!

Mutriku, Basque Country

Wow!  The north of Spain, the Basque Country is beautiful. 

As we drove along, I tried to get a good photo from the car, but really ended up with a lot of guard rails...

 There are lots of farms in these hills. They seem to be completely vertical and terraced.  I keep wondering if the cows and sheep are going to tumble right off their pastures.

I don't worry about the goats.

The mountains tumble right into the Bay of Biscay.  

I still need to put my feet into this body of water, BTW.

We are staying in a small village called Mutriku.   When we forget we call it Mukilteo, but it's very different.

Here's our street.

Tony thinks I should paint this, so I probably will since we will have days at sea coming up.

And right now we can hear the accordion player from the town square.

There's one for my cat lover reader. 😉

We have noticed how family friendly this area is.  There are families out together whenever there isn't school.  There was a big Halloween celebration last night.  The whole town square was full of people, all the restaurants were open.  In the daytime they had races for kids running down these cobblestone streets.  Later in the day,  runners and cyclists came through.  It is a tough course here too.  Easily as steep and hilly as trying to run in Lisbon. We burn off the day's calories walking up the 4 hills to the car.

(I got that from Google. I don't know where that is taken from!)

Anyway it has been a good lesson here in small town family.  It has been difficult to communicate as most people speak Basque and the signs are in that language.  

I'm guessing our brains might be just a bit bigger. 

Oh, and you have to see our place.

Seriously,   it's like staying with your gramma 

The fridge is stocked and there's plenty of coffee.

You also get to sleep in your gramma's bed...

San Sebastian

Hey!  The sun came out and the rains stopped so we took a road trip to San Sebastian, Spain.

There's a pretty wide beach, people were bravely swimming amd frolicking in the waves.   There were surfers, paddleboarders and kayaker as the day went on and the waves got higher.

This wrought iron fence is a hallmark of the town.  You can buy pendants, jewelry, mementos with this shape in it.  I have to say I was relieved to see NO padlocks of love all over it.

We found some art.  Note the dad fishing with the kid with the heart.

This piece , on the side of the Cathedral of San Sebastian depicts the shape of sound. 

No surprise.   Everyone, who is anyone,  is here at the Cathedral.

One of the city's centers used to be a bullring.

Now the apartments surrounding it have the numbers of what used to be the seats.

Kinda cool.

We enjoyed shopping here as well.

 If only.....

There's a Halloween movie festival going on, we may have to miss it...

 This was a surprisingly tropical town for chilly Northern Spain.

Check out that mysterious palm tree trunk.

These look like Gaudi balconies on a residential street.

We walked through a couple of parks.

We found a sidewalk bar with a view and where we had some of San Sebastian's famous pintxo  or Tapas.

Then we waved goodbye to our friends, Don Quixote and Sancho and headed home.

Salamanca 2

We thought we should do a separate post for the churches.  They were pretty rich.  There was the "new" church from the 16th C and the old church from the 12th C.  And it was nice of the new guys not to wreck the old one.

The organ was quite something.

There's the organist. Can you imagine?

Here's the choir, done for the day.

As you can imagine, it's very vaulty.

There might even be a Grail...

The "old" church had lots of intact frescoes.

Is that Easy Peasy guarding the tomb?

There was an altar with 52 panels so the priest could have a subject every week.

There was a tomb of patrons of the original Cathedral.   Note that the woman is praying(rosary) and man is fighting (sword).  Seems to be a tale throughout history.

 

The "new" church was refurbished a bit in the 1990s, with the addition of some new gargoyles in the vinework around the entrance.

This one in particular has spawned a lot of ancient aliens theories until the theorists read the facts.

This dragon got himelf an ice cream cone.

And this one is just a mystery.

See you soon!

Évora Stones

On our quest to see bone chapels, we also ran into megaliths.  These Celtic stone formations are older than the pyramids.

Whatta deal!

Cromeleque dos Almendres.  

This is an oval of 95 megalithic stones stretching down a rough eastward facing slope.

Some still have carvings on them.

They are set  in a landscape of cork and olive trees.

It's not an easy entrance...or maybe not even legal...however we powered through.

Tony managed it with no blood spilled.

2 KM away there's the Menhir dos Almendres. 

It's quite a trek.  We climbed up on the hill and hung onto the fence whenever we met anyone coming out.

And here it is.  Right in the middle of someone's cork plantation.

These were ceremonial stones.  For crowning a king, or electing a Mayor, maybe of Sea Tac...how appropriate.