Author: charlie

Portugalete to Pobeña, Friday, April 20

Post by Wynette: We walked 8.1 miles this morning and arrived at Pobeña around 10:30. We could not believe how easy and fast the walk was. We stopped at a bar and had breakfast and coffee, walked to our hotel, checked in, rested, walked around town a little, had a delicious menu del día at 1:00, rested, then Charlie walked back to previous town, along boardwalk shown previous post, to buy groceries for dinner. (Pobeña is tiny and doesn’t have a grocery store of any kind.) I met Charlie as he was walking back and we walked on the beach. So Charlie added 3 more miles and I added 2 more miles to our daily mile count. Makes me feel a little less guilty we are taking it so easy.

More on Vizcaya Bridge

Post by Wynette: When we posted yesterday about the “hanging ferry” bridge we didn’t know much of its history. We have since learned it was built in 1800s by a student of Eiffel and is a Unesco World Heritage site. This Wikipedia article says it was built so as not to disrupt ship traffic. This is very near where the river flows into the Atlantic, which you can sort of see from photo I took hanging out of our hotel window. There was also a ferry boat just up river that took people, but not cars, back and forth.

All cod, all the time

Salted cod is important in Basque culture and in the rest of Spain too. This store only sells cod. This fixation on cod began 1000 years ago when Basque fishermen found cod off Canada in the North Atlantic. We find this love for cod to be strange when there is so much fresh local fish available whereas cod is neither local nor fresh.