We reluctantly left San Sebastian in a light rain. It seemed like an hour of busy city streets, onramps, off-ramps, overpasses, and underpasses to get 5km out of the city. The topography was crazy. If you took a choppy sea and suddenly froze it then put a 4-millimeter high bicycle on it, that would represent what we rode over.
We finally found a back road that wormed its way along a river. After about 20km we had to cross the river on a temporary bridg
e as the main bridge was under construction. That was not the last bridge construction we would see.On the other side of the river we started climbing an enormous hill. We reached about 300 meters, according to my altimeter, before a screaming descent back to the coast. This became the rhythm of the day. Cross a river, climb a huge hill, descend, go back to Step 1.
At the bottoms of the hills we went through some fantastic beach towns, any one of which we could have stayed the night in. Lots of people strolled up and down the beach and water fronts, lifting umbrellas against the rain.
A few people really were swimming, and several surfing while wearing wet suits.
We stopped a couple times for coffee and tapas, locking our bikes in some covered place. We walked into cafes with our raincoats, pants, hair, and boots dripping like we had just come out of the sea.We were incredibly happy. In France it was always a big splurge to have coffee and a donut. But even when we were ready to splurge in France, it was often hard to find a place that served snacks with coffee. French bakeries rarely had places to sit and rarely served coffee. And French coffees served whole meals, not snacks.
So for a bike tourist, nothing beats Spanish tapas (appetizers). The food is already on the bar waiting for you. You don't have to speak a word of Spanish. You just point. It helps to say, "Cafe con leche" but even that's optional. Also, every place, no matter how small, has a good espresso machine.
Best of all, coffee with milk cost about a third or less of what it cost in France. (Usually a little under US$1, compared to US$3 in France).
The little fishing village of Gateria sits at a dramatic spot where a giant rock, like the rock of Gibralter, sits just offshore, connected to the mainland by a narrow, flat strip of rock and beach. The town itself is on a steep slope just at the edge of the mainland, right above the isthmus. It looks like it was built sometime before the Spanish discovered the right angle. The narrow streets aren't quite straight. The floor of the ancient church goes uphill towards the pulpit. No two walls in the church are parallel. We had to walk around a bit to find this great, probably modern stained glass window that was perfect for the church -- an abstract bunch of criss-crossing lines like a pile of pick-up sticks.
We rode down the narrow steep pedestrian-only streets to the isthmus, which didn't have much except a big warehouse and truck loading facility. We rode out of town on a new road built, I presume, for the trucks.
Maybe because we took this new road back to the highway, at that time not accessible for cars unless they came in the same way, we missed the sign. Even if we had seen it, we might not have been able to translate it. It must have read something like "Road Closed ahead. Local Traffic only."
We had the highway all to ourselves for the next 5km or so. That should have been sign enough. But we rode along, fat, dumb and happy, thrilled with our luck at finding such an empty, pretty, and flat coastal highway.
At the end of 5kms we reached a big fence. Through it we could see the road was completely torn up about 200 meters ahead. They were rerouting and straightening the windy road. At places nothing was left but mud. We thought we could probably get over those places if we had to. But the construction continued around the bend. And who knew? There there could have been a bridge out.
We didn't w
ant to take that risk, so we took the "detour"-- a small road heading up a gulley, to the left of the fence. We didn't see any detour sign or even an arrow pointing to the detour, but we weren't about to go back. The road climbed and climbed and climbed through mostly farm land. Since it was February nothing was growing. The hill was just mud and some grassy sheep pastures.We had some terrific views of the sea, and other times we looked ahead at a a small road climbing the mountain in front of us. I really hoped that wasn't the road we were on.
There were several intersections with sign posts pointing out towns that weren't big enough to show up on our map, nor big enough to show up much in real life. One dead end road took us to a hotel at the top of a knoll. Through a window we saw a woman sitting at a computer, looking warm, dry and comfortable. Joan yelled out, "Zumaia?" (the next town).
The woman shook her head and frowned. She pointed back the way we came and made a big loop. This discouraged me a bit. It was like she was saying, "you can't get there from here."
She didn't discourage Joan. We went back to the last intersection, determined to keep heading east no matter what. At least Joan was determined. I figured we'd be turning around soon.
The road got smaller and smaller. We passed a surprising number of people walking on the road. They looked at us a bit strangely but only said, "hola." I didn't want to ask directions for fear of the answer.
Eventually the pavement ended. The road became just a couple muddy ruts, probably a tractor access road for some distant pastures. Finally we cleared the top of a hill and got a wonderful panorama, if a bit cloudy and gray, of the Atlantic and the large bay containing Zumaia.
At that point there was no going back. We figured we could walk across the fields if necessary. The road turned steeply down a hill and became extremely muddy. We got off the bikes and walked or rather slid with them about 100 meters. Not even a 4-wheel-drive car could have gone up that. At the bottom we found a small paved road that led us to the main road. We laughed all the way down.
Next: Bridge Out
