Uncategorized / April 18, 2024

Thank you, pilgrim

Today we walked about 7 miles from Castro Urdiales to Islares. The first half wasn’t wonderful: very close to a noisy highway, etc. But the last half was quite nice — see above photo. It rained most of the first half and then cleared enough for us to take off our rain coats. Someone on

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Uncategorized / April 17, 2024

Aceitunas con café

We stopped at a bar on our walk today. Charlie remembered it from 2018. I didn’t till we actually got there. We left Basque Country on today’s walk and entered Cantabria. Charlie remembered that the great pinchos (Basque tapas) were missing from this bar. We went in and, sure enough, they had hardly anything to

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Uncategorized / April 17, 2024

Setting out for the day

We started today’s walk on this boardwalk. Way up ahead you can barely see Christina and Kelly, the couple Charlie mentioned in today’s diary. They walked about the same pace as us so we ran into them several times, passing each other. About half way through the day, Kelly spotted a restroom for all of

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Uncategorized / April 16, 2024

Fútbol

Charlie and I’ve come to appreciate soccer more since we watched Ted Lasso. Of course, Spain is soccer-crazy. And, of course, they don’t call it soccer, they call it fútbol. When we got to our hotel yesterday we noticed red and white striped flags along the front (photo above). When we checked in we asked

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Uncategorized / April 16, 2024

Spanish tortilla

Today we had our first tortilla of this trip. It’s what we had for breakfast in a bar between Portugalete and La Arena. A Spanish tortilla is not like a US/Mexico/New Mexico tortilla. A Spanish tortilla is sometimes described as an omelette. It’s made from eggs and potatoes and onions. A bit firmer/thicker than an

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Uncategorized / April 16, 2024

Four Star Hotel Towels

Last night in Portugalete we splurged on a four-star hotel (still less than $100). Would you say the towel is big enough? It was heavy, too. I couldn’t bring myself to use another of these (waste all those resources to wash and dry it) so I just dried with Charlie’s towel.

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Uncategorized / April 16, 2024

Lunch in La Arena

We are spending the night in a tiny town named La Arena. The word arena means sand in Spanish and, no surprise, there is a large sandy beach here that is bigger than the non-beach part of the town. We had picked out a place for lunch (the only place in town that offered more

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