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It’s not unusual to see signs in English. These kind of cool signs were all within a block of each other, as we were walking into San Vicente.

We walked from Comillas to San Vicente del la Barquera. Two great little towns.

Yesterday when we were visiting the Gaudí house, as you may have read, I slid down a spiral staircase several steps. I was wishing we had taken a photo of that staircase. But found this one online:

I had a feeling I’d done something to my right knee. I could walk ok so was hoping for the best. Still can walk just fine but find I cannot put any weight on it when it is bent. Makes it interesting to get up and down from sitting!

We had really been looking forward to today’s walk and were pleased that walking wasn’t painful and didn’t seem to make anything worse so we got to do the whole walk. We were lucky that it was a relatively flat day with smooth surfaces. Tomorrow might be a different story!

Now for the weather. Wind! Wow, the worst we’ve seen this trip. Comparable to a bad day in Albuquerque or Tatum where I grew up in southeast New Mexico (which has even worse wind than Albuquerque if you can believe it). But, luckily it was sunny most of the way so we weren’t too uncomfortable. It’s been cloudy since we got to San Vicente and now with the wind it is very cold. Good to be in this warm bar.

On this trip, we’ve enjoyed spending an hour or two in the late afternoons in a bar blogging and catching up on email. We usually have a decaf. The bar was nearly empty when we came but now it is nearly full. I think because it is too windy and cold for people to sit out on the patio. We were feeling guilty taking up a table and not buying much.

So, we decided to order something else. Ended up with some ancovy/pepper tapas. Quite good even though I’m still pretty full after our rice/seafood lunch.

I wrote before about the tires on top of the plastic covered hay bales, apparently to “weigh them down”. This turns out to be a clever deception on their part, it does nothing of the sort.

Miles: 7.7 miles from 0 to 299 feet, up 381, down 469
Miles walking on a long beach: 2
Peruvian restaurants visited: 1
Hay bale plots uncovered: 1

Today was a beautiful walk, one of the best of the trip. We (and by “we” I mean Wynette, my memories are scenes with no attached locations) remembered it from 2018. We stopped at a seaside bar that we stopped at in 2018.

It was windy the whole way but coming into San Vicente it was almost blow-you-over windy, and cold.

We ate at Bar Colón. It was listed as a Peruvian restaurant but it only had four Peruvian dishes. We had rice with mariscos (seafood). They didn’t call it “paella” but it was paella-like and quite good.

Miles: 6.1 miles, from 56 to 387 feet, 459 feet up, 696 feet down
Gaudi fantasies visited: 1 (separate post)
Baby animals: lots: horses, sheep, cows – the calves were yesterday, a nice thing about walking in the spring
Markets strolled through: 1

Tonight we are in Comillas. According to the sign at the beginning of town, it is “one of the most beautiful towns in Spain”. We are charmed by it.

Antoni Gaudí, of Barcelona cathedral fame, designed a house for a rich lawyer here. It is called El Capricho de Gaudí, which means “Guadí’s Whim.” We were able to tour it this afternoon.

Guadí was still young when he created this estate. It’s whimsical but not nearly as much as his cathedral in Barcelona that he did when he was older.

Here are some photos.

A couple more stories about our visit:

Admission was €10. However, they said if we were over 65 years old it was €5. We were a little disappointed they didn’t ask for our IDs when they charged us €5.

The stairs to go between floors were tiny spiral staircases with thin wedge steps. It had been raining and the bottom of our shoes were still slightly wet. As we were going down one of them I slipped and slid down a few steps. Yikes. It was scary. Luckily I caught myself. Nothing broken except my pride. A little sore in the knee and little finger. I’m pretty sure nothing serious. It did take me a while to recover from the shock of it.

The above large beautiful church (iglesia in Spanish) was in the tiny town of La Iglesia. Below we see it after leaving town.

In the next tiny town we saw this tiny church:

To our surprise, it was open. So, we went inside. It had some beautiful, I think new, stained glass. Joe, you would have liked this.