Saturday, we were done with air travel but not yet at our first real stop of the trip. It's a four hour drive from Madrid to the Northern Coastal city of Bilbao in Spain's Basque area.
Driving a ways after a long air journey is not an enjoyable task, at least for me. Despite it being a relatively short distance, I needed a couple of stops to let my body rest and to refocus my attention. Fortunately, there was little in the way of traffic once we were out of Madrid. We had accurate GPS coordinates for our Airbnb. Our host has been very communicative. We made it to the building exactly when we said we would and she was there to meet us.
Our host is a throw back to an older, simpler Airbnb time when most properties were lived in at one time by the hosts. Rather than the 'self check-in', she showed us everything in the apartment and made sure we settled. As she even made sure we had something for breakfast as supermarkets are closed on Sundays in Spain.
Even so, I made a quick walk to a supermarket that is only few blocks away to get some more provisions as we didn't want to do much other than rest up and especially give Wife's foot a rest. One of our goals in returning to places/countries we are familiar with is to enjoy a different environment without actually having to move to it. This is definitely becoming true for us and Spain as my quick trip to the supermarket confirmed. It might be a different chain, but the general layout, and offerings are familiar so I didn't waste time looking for things they don't have and (mostly) found all the things I did want.
It was a grey day with rain on and off. We talked to children around the world. We had a big salad for dinner. We did laundry. I will do a post on the apartment itself, which is very comfortable.
The weather on Monday is not supposed to be much better than today. We are very focused on bringing Wife's foot and overall walking strength along gradually. Unfortunately that means we will probably miss out on a lot of the classic things one would do in Bilbao (the Guggenheim Museum, wandering the old town, food tours, etc.) but we knew that when we came. We have checked out a number coastline towns that we think will be good for photography (like we did when we were salvaging our Swedish trip right after the injury). Our plan is to scope them all out tomorrow so we know where we want to go when the weather improves starting Tuesday.
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