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I like to say I was born with an internal compass. Throw me in the middle of a forest, large city or corn maze and I’ll be able to get out. With a map, I’d get out quicker. The Achille’s Heel of this gift is that if and when I lose my bearings, I literally feel uncomfortable, even sick at times.
We got lost driving into Santiago de Compostela yesterday. Josh had the map turned the wrong way, and we spent at least half an hour driving around the city. Today, while driving from Santiago toward Madrid, the gas light went on. I pulled over in Ourense to find petrol. I wasn’t worried about not having a map or a record of where to go. Instead of driving around the city, I turned onto the equivalent of a county road toward Madrid. My Spanish driving experience had taught me that county roads have stops every 20 km or so, when driving through a tiny town. Sure enough, five kilometers later we pulled into a full service gas station.
After Pamplona, we silently agreed I’d be driving in and out of cities. I’m excited to drive around Madrid, down the wide Paseo de la Castellana, Paseo de los Recoletos and Paseo del Prado streets.
The Picos de Europa.
If we ever stop seeing mountains or ocean on this trip, we know we’ve taken a wrong turn. This morning we drove to the Picos de Europa National Park, located in both Cantabria and Asturias regions. I drove through the mountains at a safe 70 kilometers per hour on the skinny but perfectly paved road. (The roads have been WONDERFUL, even the small teeny tiny ones. No bumps, potholes, major construction. I’m amazed at the condition, but it could be because I’m from Illinois where we have two seasons: winter and road construction.)
We stopped in Potes and visited the Monasterio de Santo Toribio de Liébana. Inside the chapel lies the largest chunk of Christ’s cross, believed to be the part where a nail passed through Jesus’s left hand. It’s housed inside a cross, behind bars and about 50 feet away from where it can be viewed.
The view was incredible.
We cut through the northern part of Los Picos on the way West. More curvy roads, traffic circles, mountains, cows.
Two hours later, we were in Ribadesella, home of La Cueva de Tito Busillo, full of Paleolithic cave paintings that can be seen on page one of the world history textbooks. We were early for the last tour of the day, so we visited the neighboring Cuevona de Ardines. After climbing 300 steps, we descended into a large chamber where we got a history lesson from a prerecorded Wizard of Oz, accompanied by the equally low-tech light projections on the wall.
The actual cave tour took an hour and a half. After hiking 700 or so meters into the cave, we saw the paintings: horses, reindeers, female genitalia (respect for fertility.)
Now we’re on our way to a new region: Galicia. Our first stop is A Coruña, the port city capital of Spain’s Northwest. Current conditions: 13 degrees Celsius, misty rain, dense fog.
Josh’s turn to drive. Olite → Pamplona → San Sebastian. Pamplona was too much city for Josh, and we got a little turned around in the traffic circles. We finally parked and walked to the Plaza del Castillo for café at La Iruña, the café popularized by Hemmingway in The Sun Also Rises. There were no bulls. The Festival of San Fermín (running of the bulls) starts in early July.
We returned to the car just as a meter maid was writing a parking ticket for our car. I tried to explain to her that we were gone a few minutes, from the U.S., never been in Pamplona, but she had already finished printing the ticket. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “You have to pay after 4 p.m.” It was 4:45. She walked away before we could ask her how to pay it.
Josh looked at the ticket: 60 euros. Whoa. Upon closer inspection, we realized it was only 11.65 if paid within the hour. The ticket and instructions were written in Basque, similar to Spanish but not.
While trying to pay the parking machine incorrectly with a credit card, the meter maid walked past and explained to us how to pay it, in coins only, through the machine. Bitch. Neither of us had that much in coins and the banks close at 3, so we had to buy half a pound of candy at a coffee shop to break a large bill. Not a complete loss.
We got off the beaten path in the Navarra region and detoured to Olite (population 3400), drawn by the wine museum one of our guidebooks told us about. Off the highway, it took us longer to get there than we thought, so we arrived to a sleepy town mid-siesta. The wine museum, bodegas, stores, everything was closed for the 2 hour lunch break. Restaurants and bars were still serving, so we did what the Spaniards do: drank wine, ate cheese bocadillos (French bread with thick slices of cheese) and window shopped.
We walked into the busiest place we could find (my personal rule for finding good food/drink in an unknown place) and ordered a glass of the two specialty wines brewed in the region (Navarra.) Both were good but the Ochoa was better. We were shocked when the bartender told us it was 2 euros for both glasses. That’s about $1.35 at the current exchange rate.
We picked up the car this morning — a Citroen 4, 1.4L injection, automatic. Josh calls it a “fake automatic,” I think it drives like a glorified go-cart. We were excited to pick up the car and get out of Barcelona, which Josh now understands how it’s my least favorite city in Spain.
I got us out of Barcelona, and traffic wasn’t too bad. I had a little too much fun changing lanes and driving in traffic circles. Cars and trucks would stop in the right lane to unload things, so lane changes were many.
Converting the litre/kilos reading, the car has been getting about 38 miles per gallon. We probably won’t have to fill up until after the Picos. Gas is about $3.25 a gallon here, and luckily the car takes the cheapest diesel.
More photos of the car to come…
