Northern Coast of Spain

We got up at 6:00 a.m. in Barcelona, dodged the people who were still partying in the streets from the night before, and went to the airport to fly to Bilbao. From there, we drove to . . .

Castro Urdiales, a quaint little beach town

. . . with a statue warning of sharks in the waters in that direction. If you think that joke is slightly distasteful, it was Martha’s idea. If you like it, it was Martha’s idea but I liked it too.

Question – if you order a tortilla for lunch (Spanish tortillas are thick egg and potato things, sometimes with meat or fish in them), and when you dig in you find it full of small gray ocean-related animals that look like baby eels or little slimy worms, and you eat one or two of those two-inch long buggers and wrap the rest of them up in a napkin to throw away so as not to offend your host, what are those things? Really, I need to know. I can’t find them on Google and when I asked the guy what they were called and put that word into Google Translate, it came up with nothing. And we’ve been feeling slightly queasy all day. So really, what are those things? We also found a store that sells jars full of them. To avoid upsetting sensitive viewers, I have placed the picture of those jars at the very end of this post.

Otherwise, Castro Urdiales was delightful, and we left there to spend the night here, at a beach just west of Santoña, at which we pretty much built meals around just bread and cheese, having decided to take it easy in the food department for the rest of the day.

View from our room

The places we drove through today are along the route of my bike ride last year. I have noticed that the endless extreme ascents and descents deliver pretty different experiences depending on whether you are travelling in a car or on a bike. But in both cases you feel sorry for the people on the bikes.

And in the “I don’t know what to make of It” department, we are staying in a hotel on a beach; there is nothing around for miles but there is a bus full of middle-aged British tourists here. I don’t know what they did all day or why they’re here, but tonight there’s a Cajun dance party in the lobby and they’re out there dancing to the song Jambalaya. This is the mystique of Cantabria – people from England dancing to music written by Hank Williams inspired by Cajuns, being sung in English by a Spaniard.

Tomorrow, Asturias.