(written 15/3/2006 08:17 CET in Luso, Portugal)
We had a bit of a wander around San Sebastián and eventually sat for a cheap breakfast - actually, everything was looking cheap compared to France - fuel, accommodation and food was all notably more within our budget.
A little bit of a drive down the road we had parked on took us to great views across the bay to the road we wanted to drive out along the coast on. And we did this, after successfully negotiating the city's streets. This other much bigger beach was massively under renovation no doubt for the coming busy summer season - it would have been a great place to catch some sun, but today there wasn't much of that.
Our next target was Bilbao/Bilbo along the northern coast of España, but we got a little lost on the roads there, looping around and eventually deciding a nice break for tea in a park which was in an area no tourist could ever had made it to was a good idea. While there, I rang
Citroën. With our little car, since it is brand new, we have to get it for its first service between 1500 and 2500 kilometres - we were now within this range. They told me the addresses of three Citroën places in
Bilbao, which I noted and we then drove onwards to find.
This was a hugely ugly place, with way to many motorway overpasses, poorly signposted, and we had no map of it at all. The signs eventually got us to the
Guggenheim museum, which is the sole thing we really wanted to have a look at while there. We needed a map though to locate the car dealers, so I went inside to ask for one at the i inside.
While gone, Liz attempted to pay for some parking, but the machine proved completely non-decypherable for anyone not speaking Basque languages. So she sat in the car, money in hand, to plead with any oncoming parking inspectors. One was approaching as I returned with map, and we decided to hot-foot it out of the place and find somewhere else to stop.
It turns out that finding our way to these Citroën places was completely impossible with the info we had, so after wasting an hour we aimed for something smaller.
We picked
Burgos instead, driving there along our favourite combination of fast and small roads. We parked and trudged back and forward with packs from one end of town to the other to the cheap recommended pension, stopping for directions from a helpful cafeteria lady.
Going out a little later for dinner, nothing much else was around (or, strangely for a little town, affordable) so we wandered into give the cafeteria some business to thank them for their help earlier. Big. Mistake.
If them turning the lights on as we entered the cavernous empty restaurant didn't warn us enough, the dust in the wine glasses should have, but to cut a long ugly poorly tasting story short this place sucked.
We made the best of it, behaving rather poorly in the presence of nobody else at all, before heading home to bed.