We weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow but the weather interfered. We can’t complain. We’ve had beautiful weather every day until now even though it was cold in Paris. We missed Biarritz but have an extra day here in Bilbao.

The port provides shuttle buses into the centre of town. It is about a thirty minute drive but it was an interesting drive and there were plenty of buses. So it was an efficient operation.

Bilbao is in the Spanish Basque Country as is San Sebastián where we spent a little over a week in 2014 at the end of our 45 day train trip around Spain. We loved wandering the old town of San Sebastián (Donostia), eating pintxos and washing them down with txakoli, the fresh new wine of the area which is poured from high above the glass.

So today we were back in Basque Country and we set out to wander the old town, eat pintxos and drink txakoli. We had a great time. There are some lovely old buildings in the old town here. David gets so excited when he sees the rows and rows of jamon hanging in the stores. Our lunch of pintxos with a glass of txakoli each cost us about A$30 and was delicious. Our only disappointment was the waiter just poured our wine in the normal way rather than from 40cms or so above the glass.

We don’t enjoy modern art. We love the impressionists and we’ve see many magnificent paintings in the last two weeks so we were not interested in going into the Guggenheim museum but everyone raves about it so we went to check out the titanium building. It’s an interesting shape but, again, not our thing. I did love the floral dog made with pansies, violas and heartsease. It was impressive.