Road Trip Day 5: Pays Basque/Pais Vasco and the Pyrenées

Sunday morning, we got up confused!  The alarm on my iPod seemed to have sounded an hour later than I set it for, but when I looked at it, it DID say 7:00.  Judy's watch said 8:00.  So we turned on the tv in the hotel room and it also said 7:00.  So I started thinking, did we drive across a time zone last night?!  Then someone suggested (I think it was Mel, clever girl) that the clocks must have gone back--it was the last weekend in October after all.  So that made sense and we carried on (although, I would find myself confused again later that evening).

We got up ready for another full day in the car, but we were anticipating some extreme beauty.  A month before, when this idea for the road trip came up, I had googled "driving in Europe" and found some recommended places at this Guardian newspaper link that had one recommended drive that could work for us: Basque Country.  Doing some reading in Rick Steves' again (this time, since Basque is in both countries, we had to read both the French book and the Spain book that Judy brought, although the Spain book wasn't a Rick Steves book and just wasn't the same), we learned that the people from Basque speak a language called Euskara and that this language is unique without any connection to any other languages (it is not a latin language, for example, like the French and Spanish that surround its speakers)!  Very interesting.  Euskara has a lot of k's and z's and here is a bilingual sign at the beach in San Sebastián.

We were not disappointed with the drive and before we arrived to our lunch destination of San Sebastián, we discovered the beauty that is Biarritz, in French Basque.

 This photo does not do justice to the amazing view of the ocean and the Pyrenées.  We decided that we would try to get to the beach and we did!  Amazing...I was suddenly quite overdressed!

We started up really high and then made our way down.  The waves were incredible and mesmerizing.  Some absolutely monstrous and killer waves.  I tried making a video...

 We continued on in search of Spain!  We arrived, but we don't know exactly when since there was no welcoming sign.  We were following signs for San Sebastián, or "Donostia" as it seemed to be called in Euskara and at some point we noticed that there was no more French.  San Sebastián was also gorgeous: we passed through the city centre quickly in search again of the beach, but both were beautiful.  We reached our goal for lunch, but since it was a Sunday, it was hard to find anything open and we ended up only finding a döner place...really cool ordering shawarmas from a Turkish guy in Spanish Basque...he seemed to speak a zillion languages!

This is a creative shot by Judy...some girls were just wandering the streets on their own, eating ice cream

We still had a long drive ahead to make it just west of Barcelona for the night, but a beautiful drive!  Albeit, kind of scary with speeds of 100 km/h through the Pyrenées!  Since I was driving, these following shots are courtesy of Mel.

Photo Credit: Mel Horst

Once out of the mountains, things were a lot more barren and not so photogenic, but as the day passed on, it got pretty again.

Nice shot, Mel!

The time confusion came up again at this point, when we found ourselves crossing the Greenwich (Prime) Meridian that evening.  There was a digital clock posted after we crossed it that had us all of

sudden an hour ahead of where we had just been!  Then a few kms later, there was another clock that had us an hour behind again!  This happened a couple of times and was very confusing!

When we finally arrived to the hotel in Rubí, a sort of suburb city to Barcelona, we were still in the time zone we left in Bordeaux that morning and the clock change theory had stuck.  (It was confusing too, because in North America, the clocks didn't end up going "back" until a couple of weekends later.)  How does an iPod know, by the way?  It's the most amazing thing to me.  When I walk around in Tours, the map application is able to locate me sometimes too!  (I'm not connected to anything, so it blows my mind.  Most amazing prize that I won...the dictionary apps that I bought have been such lifesavers too!)

Here is our day's long, but beautiful route.