Because we are treading lightly on stressing Wife's foot (pun absolutely intended!), and because the weather is not particularly nice (a lot of rain predicted), we decided that we'd do a day trip to some coastal areas near Bilbao - Bermeo and Mundaka specifically.
Getting out of the city was uneventful. The terrain as we moved toward the coast reminded me of the Pacific Northwest. It is way wetter here. Greener. And there are incredibly steep and twisting roads.
Arriving in Bermeo, we immediately started to look for a place to park by the waterfront. No such luck. HOWEVER, we were able to engage in one of our FAVORITE travel activities...getting lost in incredibly narrow, Old World, city streets. Fortunately for us we managed to extricate ourselves before hitting a dead end on a road no wider than our vehicle, or going the wrong way down a one-way street (actually that's not correct. I think we did that.)
We finally found ourselves out of Bermeo town and decided to head to the nearby 'scenic beach' of Mundaka. We were more successful here in actually finding a place to take some photos. We did try to go into Mundaka town and had the same lack of luck finding parking that'd had in Bermeo.
I'd decided I'd had enough of driving in the semi-rural Basque coastal countryside so we headed back to Bilbao. Here we managed to miss a key turn on the road back to our apartment and plunged right into the center city. I only ran three red lights. However, we despite our team navigating effort, we managed to have around 6 'recalculating' moments as we missed turn, after turn, until we MIRACULOUSLY suddenly were at our apartment. We finished off our driving day with a classic 35 point parking to get into our parking place while my car's proximity alarm is beeping incessantly so you have no idea of what part of your you might be close to hitting, and you keep inadvertently going into manual mode with the transmission instead of reverse. Fun, Fun. Fun.
I'm pretty proud of ourselves. In our very first day we managed to cram in all of the Euro driving craziness we usually encounter during a whole trip! Super twisty mountain roads? Check. Getting lost in incredibly narrow Medieval type streets? Check. Incredibly stressful driving through the middle of a large city while getting totally lost? Check. Insane narrow parking garage experience? Check.
And (honestly) Wife and I were for the most part pretty even keeled. This is not our first rodeo and we've worked very hard to be a good team.
Fotografika
Scenes from our apartment in Bilbao
We Surrender! Finally getting out of Bermeo and finding a place we could stop and figure out where to go next.
Mundika
Study of a Surfer
Looking back at Bermeo Harbor (the pictures don't capture how incredibly windy it was at this viewpoint.
Un Poco de Gastronomia
In Madrid, our go-to airport hotel, the Hotel Nuevo Boston, has a surprisingly good kitchen.
I am a lover of Ensalada Rusa, a version of potato salad with a variety of vegetables and canned tuna fish. But I'd never seen a version like this where, the tuna was served as a starring role (FYI canned fish is considered a high gastronomic form in Iberia). This was a really luscious version and I was glad to have tried it.
I also ordered a tagliatelle with mushrooms that had three different kinds of mushrooms. It was also quite good.
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