Lepod's Blog

Well we’ve done it slightly hard, really, as in Bordeaux Pauline and I were both felled by a really bad cold, and we ended up staying there an extra day as we were not up to doing much. And for some reason I injured my neck the first night, possibly as I was sleeping in odd positions to try and breathe with my blocked nose. This was to have far reaching consequences. Bordeaux seems really nice, and of course there’s lots of wine tasting to be done in the area. Not for us this time! We settled for an open air bus tour, and one day we caught the tram into town and took a walk by the river. The weather was warm, and the children were out in force on this unusual fountain arrangement which sprays enough water to have a couple of inches in which the children run and slide and splash and generally keep cool. In the background is one of the doors to the inner city, with a famous statue of some sort. We mostly concentrated on getting better so not many pictures I’m afraid.

Then it was time to head for Spain, which I was really looking forward to, never having been there.  we decided to head for San Sebastian, a coastal town only a couple of hours from the French border, in Basque country on the southern coast of the Bay of Biscay. The drive was easy on the French side, a bit more challenging on the Spanish side as we were skirting round the feet of the Pyrenees, and the road was fairly twisty. We had found an excellent 4 star hotel on hotelclub for less than half price, and we were very pleased to get there. The hotel room had a nice big comfortable bed, and a balcony with a table we could eat our breakfast at, the staff were extremely nice and spoke good english. The next day, we took the bus into town. The header at the top of the blog currenly shows what the bay looks like, also here’s a couple of photographs.

You can see that it’s pretty nice. The old part of town has lots of nice ancient cathedrals and there’s a big statue of Jesus up on the hill which looks quite spectacular at night. I was more interested in the food by this stage as I had my appetite back! So we pottered about the town and had a meal, then the next day went back for more. It started to rain and I had my jandals on, the paving stones were slippery, like black ice, the next thing I knew I was on the ground and had shaken up my neck again.

However I felt alright and we had another very good dinner of some sort of fish. The waiter was Columbian but he spoke good english, and helped us with the menu. All in all, it was a very good introduction to Spain. Next day (and my next post) we were off to Barcelona. Here’s the route we took, as you can see it’s from one coast to the other right across the middle.