As we tried to park our bikes outside a hole-in-the-wall cafe in Zumaia, a nice car pulled over and the driver started talking to us in Spanish. He was a middle-aged man with thick graying hair and a large eastern European face.
He never smiled or acted particularly friendly. We didn't understand him very well but he listened to us very patiently and worked with us until we did understand, at least a bit. He told us that our choice of restaurants was mediocre, but didn't offer any other suggestions.
He asked us where we were going. We told him Lekeito. He said it was 28km of difficult road and that was too far by this time of day. "Mal tiempo" he said, pointing to a solid roof of grey clouds overhead. I understood this bit of Spanish. It had rained every single day we had been in Spain. After "buenos dias", the second phrase I learned was "mal tiempo" or "bad weather."
But our weatherman didn't offer any other to take us home or direct us to any other hotels. He did say that Mitriku was only 14km away. He drove away and I had the feeling there was something he tried to tell us that we didn't understand.
We figured there were three coastal towns in the next 28km and we could stop at any of them.
He was right about the road. It was difficult but also very scenic -- even in the rain. It reminded me a lot of highway one on the California coast, especially near Big Sur.
As we passed each town the traffic thinned. After we left the last town before Lekeitio, there were almost no cars at all. When we left we saw a big sign with a whole paragraph that we couldn't read. But it started with a phrase that we translated to "Heavy Vehicles." We didn't see the word "Puente" (bridge). We figured it didn't apply to us.
After that, the road was so empty it was like our private bike
lane. But the rain never let up. On a day like that, where it rains from sun up to sun down, I never get a sense of time passing. It's like I'm waiting all day for the sun to come up, and then suddenly it's dark.Right at dark we rounded a bend and saw Lekeito: lots of tall apartment buildings. It appeared big enough to have a hotel for us. We descended rapidly, losing all the altitude we had been earning for several miles.
Then at the bottom we saw what the sign had been trying to say. The bridge across the last river of the day, just outside town, was closed for construction.
I have no idea what the big sign in the previous town said, but who would have though that a sign that only had to say "Bridge Out" would start with the words, "heavy vehicle"? I have to hand it to the guy who invented the term "Bridge Out." It says it all in just two words.
We weren't about to take the detour which headed straight up a hill in the opposite direction. According to my map, it would be way out of our way.Only half the bridge deck had been torn off. We moved aside part of the fence blocking pedestrians from doing what we were going to do. Unfortunately, on the other side of the bridge, it wasn't so easy. The workers had done an admirable job of making an impenetrable fence.
We were stuck. We weren't actually on the bridge anymore. We were on a sidewalk, in town, in front of an apartment building. But the huge fence ran across all the sidewalk and the road, so we couldn't actually continue into town. And we couldn't go the other way on the road, because it just went back to the bridge.
We found a place pedestrians could get through but is was impossible for the bikes--even if we took all the luggage off. We have carried our bikes over many fences, but we couldn't do it with this one because it was high
, but too flimsy to climb. The only way to get them over would be to throw them and our luggage more than 3 meters in the air.As we searched for an escape route, an old woman on the other side of the fence kept screeching, "No pasa!" We ignored her but she gave us a bad feeling about the town. Luckily, some men who were with her motioned us around the back of an apartment building. The lady tried to shut them up, but we saw. The men were saying that if we carried the bikes over a low fence into the backyard of the building, we could wheel them around the building and into town. It took us about 10 minutes to take everything off our bike and do this.
After a tiresome search and asking several people we found a wonderful but fairly expensive hotel - the only hotel in town. We got a whole suite of rooms for 6200 pesetas, or about US$41. Very comfy. Too bad we only stayed about 12 hours.
It was still raining and colder in the morning and we ended up leaving without breakfast because we couldn't find a cafe. Strange to say but true. Then we had a short wet ride to Gernika. Basically we climbed for a couple hours, snacked on a lot of tapas and coffee at a hole-in-the-wall at the top of the hill, then rode down the hill into Gernika.
We had a short debate about continuing to Bilbao or staying in Gernika. We decided if we left at that point, we would arrive in Bilbao just before dark, tired, wet, and hungry. Also Gernika had a lot of historical interest.
We were glad we stayed.
next: Gernika and Bilbao, soon to be great
