We didn’t need to check out until 12:00, so I went for a walk down to the beach, sat around, drank coffee and did emails. We had only 50km to travel today to San Sebastian, calling in at Saint Jean de Luz and Hendaye on the way. I’d never heard of San Sebastian until the ABC showed Rick Stein’s “Spain” in 2012. The first episode ended in San Sebastian, and showed it from the air, on a clear day, with the sparkling bay, the beaches, the island. Where’s that? We have to go there! And we did, the following year. We weren’t disappointed.
I didn’t consult Camille, as she would just send us onto the motorway. That was a mistake.
Minor roads and endless roundabouts getting to Saint Jean de Luz. We found the centre, parallel parked the car with the help of the rear, front, side sensors. I still need to determine how much room is left when the beep is continuous. Parking was free between 12:30 to 2:30 because all the shops close then. The 2 hours we paid for at 1pm started at 2:30.
The shops were very expensive, so I bought an umbrella to replace the one I left in the car at Holyhead. Then off towards Irun. I had read that the town next to San Sebastion was very nice, and much cheaper, so it seemed a good idea to take a look. The iphone was really too small to figure out that the town we wanted was not Irun, in Spain, but Hendaye, across the Bidasoa River, in France. Still without Camille’s help, we tried to get to Irun, crossing the river into Spain, where all the signs are in Basque. We circled a couple of roundabouts twice looking for an exit sign with the Basque equivalent of Irun. There were no signs to Irun because we were in Irun, it wasn’t on the coast. There just wasn’t anywhere we could stop and navigate. In the end we gave up and started following the signs to San Sebastian-Donostia, got there easily enough, but could not stop to work out where the pension was, or the car park at La Concha beach where they had a deal for guests. Eventually we shoehorned the car into a parallel park near the river, figured out where we were, and set Camille to get us to La Concha, 800m away. Without a GPS, I’d never attempt to drive into a sizeable city in Europe. Well I did, into Marseilles in 2010. It was a nightmare, never again. I drove into Rome once too. And the time they blocked the M25 and detoured all the traffic into the London suburbs, and that time I missed the ring road around Turin and we found ourselves in the centre, with our compass awry because of the tram wires. It’s just impossible to navigate because you can never stop to figure out where you are. Driving in crowded central San Sebastian demonstrates the magnitude of the software development task to make cars drive autonomously. People darting across pedestrian crossings and jay walking, cycle lanes going the opposite way in one way streets, separate bus/taxi lanes, different traffic lights for pedestrians, cyclists, cars and buses. Traffic lights on this side of the intersection but not the far side, so sometimes you cannot even see them while stopped. You can just about cope with all this, but not navigate in real time as well.
The bed seemed long, longer than I’d ever experienced. My feet don’t overhang the end of the bed. Then we realised that the pillows are narrow. We stripped the cover off one and found a label saying 70cm. They must be 35cm x 70cm, 15cm narrower than the normal 50cm. I have to get one of these (Anne said don’t get one for her).
The pension is very close to the centre, so close that we could hear the bells of the Eglise Santa Maria even with the windows closed. They sound a discordant, barely recognisable rendition of a Westminster chime on the quarter hour, thankfully not between 9pm and 8am.
The city is as beautiful as we remembered it from 2013.
We found a tapas bar, possibly the same one that introduced me to Sangria five years ago, and ate there, next to two retired English couples who live east of Toulouse and drove down for a few days. They don’t know what will happen next March.
Even at 8pm the crowds were thinning. The Spanish are known to dine late, but most people here are not Spanish.