Jamiewrites: Hello, San Sebastian!

Our next destination was San Sebastian, on the north coast of Spain not far from the border with France - and, as I noted in an earlier blog post, there weren't 'proper' trains between Lisbon and Spain. But it was also too far to go by bus without spending way more time than we wanted to spend. So, we'd decided to fly instead. We booked early and went with what I think was a reasonably-priced airline (Air Europa), so it didn't actually cost that much more than the train would have.

This, by the way, is what the outside of our apartment building in Lisbon looked like. We'd never actually noticed it before today.

Given the unpredictability of the Lisbon public transport system, we'd also decided to get an Über to the airport. That worked out pretty well as we got to the airport with plenty of time before boarding started. After a long time spent standing around, we checked our luggage and went to find our departure gate - but that hadn't been announced yet, only the section. So, we sat down to have (long overdue) breakfast before checking the board again to see we had been given a gate.

However, when we got to the gate we were told the flight had been delayed. This was a bit of a problem as we weren't flying to San Sebastian directly; we were flying to Madrid, then flying to Bilbao, then catching a bus from the airport to San Sebastian. We only had an hour and a bit layover waiting for the Bilbao plane, so if were delayed enough, we'd miss that flight - and I'm not sure when the next one would be.

But we were only delayed for 25 minutes or so, and got to Madrid in plenty of time to board our plane, as well as quickly grab something to eat and go to the toilet. I'd joked as we came off the plane that it'd be funny if the one we were on was also the one going to Bilbao - but it turned out to be true; we left via the exact same gate we'd arrived at.

After another hour or so flying (well, maybe half that time actually in the air) we landed in Bilbao. I went to collect the bags while Rochelle went to the bathroom. Since I'd never in my whole life not had to wait at least 15 minutes for my suitcase to appear on a belt, I was on my phone double-checking where we had to go to catch the bus instead of paying attention - so of course our bags came out right at the start. Fortunately, I looked up at the right time to see Rochelle's bag go past me and reached out to grab it; in another piece of good fortune, she had come out of the bathroom and managed to get to the other side to get mine.

Next task was to find the bus that would take us to San Sebastian. There was a bus outside but it wasn't the one we wanted - ours wasn't scheduled to leave for another 20 minutes or so, so that wasn't much of a surprise - but while I was doing that Rochelle found a ticket machine with San Sebastian on it, and we had a bit of a browse through the menu options and found it was the one we needed. After buying two tickets we went outside to wait.

A bus (the No. 50) showed up and the driver opened up the luggage bay doors and wandered off without saying anything; everyone waiting (including us) promptly loaded their stuff on. Then another No. 50 bus appeared and that bus's driver got out and told us to take our stuff off the first bus and put it in on the second bus. So, we did. And then we put ourselves on board and a few minutes later we were off.

This part of Spain looks nothing like the regions we'd been to previously - it's much greener for starters, thought that's not overly surprising, given we were now on the Atlantic coast rather than the Mediterranean. This was more like the Europe I'd seen on my previous trips.

It took us about an hour and a quarter to get to the underground bus terminal in San Sebastian; we leapt off the bus, grabbed our luggage and jumped into a lift to take us back to street level and set off to find our hotel. That was about a 20-something minute walk with our suitcases (very noisy on the pavement) - but we did see our first Shiba Inu for ages, since we left Valencia.

[We would probably have followed it for a while if we hadn't had our luggage with us.]

After finding our hotel, checking in and dumping our stuff, we set off in search of food - one of the main reasons we'd come to this city, as it is the home of pintxos, basically interesting food in even smaller servings than tapas. There was a good-sounding place not far from our hotel, so we set off in that direction.

On the way there we saw another Shiba Inu; we were obviously in the right place. And, given we were now sans suitcases, we might have gone on a bit of a detour to get closer to this one...

A few minutes later we abandoned our dog-stalking and made our way to the restaurant and ordered food.

Here we have a cuttlefish skewer (in front of Rochelle; she meant to order the shrimp skewer but between then language barrier and possibly pointing to the wrong item on the menu this is what she got), a jamon croquette and a shrimp and spinach croquette (in the middle), and a chorizo sausage cooked in apple cider (in front of me, between pieces of bread). Oh, and sangria.