We decided that the best way to celebrate Quin becoming a man (or at least a teenager) was to let him spend his birthday in France, where he could speak the language he loves (after nearly 9 months of study). So we rented another car and set off to caravan through Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country. Our first stop, just an hour out of Oviedo, was in Ribadesella, which was featured in an earlier post, this time to visit a cave with neolithic paintings. Unfortunately, Eric failed to see that reservations were required, despite scanning the website carefully (or so he thought), and there were no spots available. It's neolithic cave central here in northern Spain, however, and my boo boo was not fatal. The EXTREMELY nice people at the Tito Bustillo ticket desk called over to another cave, El Pindal, on the eastern border of Asturias, and got us reservations for later that day. I first asked about another cave that we'd visited some years ago, Puente Viesgo, but they said "That's in Cantabria," like it was the other side of the earth, and so we were happy to have them find us slots in a cave a literal stone's throw this side of Cantabria. After a quick coffee-and-nosh in the bustling town of Llanes, we headed down the coast to El Pindal, which turned out to be in a beautiful setting high above the sea. A very unprepossessing exterior, and unfortunately pictures aren't allowed inside (see the link above for some of the art), but maybe you can get a sense of the gorgeous location.
We planned to stop often on the trip to let the kids let off steam. Here you can see how well they got along. At least Annabel is smiling while slugging her cousin. (They're actually having a lot of fun here, and the roughhousing never got ugly the entire trip.)
This mammoth sculpture is based on one of the drawings in the cave. We couldn't resist the opportunity to continue our photo-series of posing-in-signs. Unfortunately, the photographer's skills seem to be deteriorating with each new sign. There was also a hermitage and a ruined monastery nearby, and a network of trails.
Our next stop was lunch, and we decided to revisit our old stomping grounds in Cantabria. We ate at one of the many seafood places on the water in San Vincente de la Barquera, which some faithful readers may recall visiting in 2001. After lunch we wandered up to the church, because the castle was locked up, and it turned out to be beautiful up there, high above the castle and the large winding bay, the highest point in the town, and I was amazed that we'd not visited it ten years ago. I didn't take my camera up there, but even if I had I wouldn't have been able to take pictures (inside the church) of the pilgrims on the altarpieces that looked exactly like pirates, or the relic shards of bone from St. Vicente. I did take before-and-after pictures of the bay, looking toward the Roman bridge. Before and after the tide came in, that is. These pictures also give a pretty good sense of the range of weather we had, shifting quickly from mostly sunny to mostly cloudy and back again.
By the time we left San Vicente, we felt a little urgency about getting to our lodgings for the night. This was the day that Eric was responsible for booking, and for a while there it looked like the casa rural that he'd booked was going to be as problematic as the cave trip he'd planned. But the owner of the bed and breakfast was helpful, giving us directions by phone and finally driving out in our direction to steer us on the right course. We needed all this help because the directions she provided in the first place were extremely vague, pointing us in the general direction of a rather large chunk of Pais Vasco. We were pretty sure we were in the right river valley, at least, but it was a very long river. Her first set of phone directions took us back ten kilometers to a turn-off that we'd passed, then along that road, which she said would "go up," and then we would be there. After we followed that road for what felt like a very long time, we called again, and she headed out to meet us as we continued up the road. By the time we met her we only had, as it turned out, four more kilometers to go, assuming we could manage to stay on the correct road. Yikes! But the place was beautiful, the food was good, and not even a windstorm that blew all night could put a damper on our stay. I tried to capture the wind in the photo below, which is otherwise not as scenic as it could have been.
The next morning we had a beautiful but exceedingly winding (as opposed to windy) drive to San Sebastian, where we parked far out but for free (because of the Easter weekend) and spent most of the day. The weather was spectacular, the town was packed, and we actually had trouble finding a place to eat because of the crowds. How about yet another shot of the two sweet children, in front of the famous San Sebastian beach? Aren't they adorable?
Of the many, many versions of St. Sebastian (the martyr, not the town) that we saw in churches and museums, this was one of my favorites. There's no mistaking those iconic arrows sticking out all over. Some saints are hard to identify, but not this one.
These kids aren't hard to identify either. I couldn't resist this picture of them taken in a moment when they were not being ironic or snarky or reciting lines from YouTube videos. They had a lot of steam to blow off after lunch, and sometimes a teeter-totter is just what's called for.
Can't hardly have a post on this here blog without a single bug picture, can we?
We had a bit of trouble finding a place to eat lunch, as I said, and already by the second day of the trip Lauren and Leon, who don't much like seafood, were growing alarmed at the range of meal options in Basque country. We found something for everyone at lunch, but poor Leon ended up with suckling pig at dinner that night in St. Jean de Luz, not so much because he wanted to munch on a baby animal as that he wanted something, anything, that didn't come from the water. They gave him the front half of the pig, unfortunately. Well, I guess that was unfortunate. I think he'd have preferred, not a particular part of the piglet, but just not being able to tell exactly what part of the piglet he was eating at any given moment.
Lauren was in charge of reservations in St. Jean de Luz, and found a great place with a heated pool, so even through the weather was a little chilly when we arrived, the kids had an hour or so of watery fun. Leon and I even joined them, after Leon got frustrated with the French keyboard on the computer in the lobby. I sympathized, remembering when I was tried to use email in France in 2006. I didn't take pictures in St. Jean de Luz--that's another batch of photos that I'm going to have to depend on Lauren and Leon supplying me with (hint, hint)--but I did have the camera out the next day, the Big Day, the day Quin Became a Man. We were instructed to refer to him throughout the day as Trogdor the Burninator, and we did our best. As you can tell from these two pictures of the kids on the beach at Biarritz (carefully selected from the approximately 50,060 I took of them on that beach), clearly Quin has Become a Man. You can tell from the manly shoulders. Not for the first or last time on this trip did the thought cross all of our minds that they could be siblings.
The other thought we all had was that they must be freezing. There were almost no swimmers in the water, just a bunch of surfers in wetsuits. But they were undaunted. This beach outing actually came at the end of a day during which they were occasionally quite patient, putting up with us wandering around Bayonne, which turned out to be my favorite place that we visited on the whole trip, maybe because I'd never seen it before. It was hopping on Good Friday, but less because of Holy Week than because they were in the middle of the Ham Festival. Which is the holiday, of the two, I would prefer to celebrate, myself.
I don't know what exactly produced this diabolical look on Quin's face, but it had something to do with the goat. Something wholesome, no doubt. Nothing that involved burninating. Or maybe he was just crazed from checking out the Bieb's latest haircut.
We had an unfortunate encounter with a very rude businesswoman in Bayonne, perhaps the rudest so-called "service worker" we'd ever had the bad luck to meet, but maybe she'd been driven mad by the Ham Festival crowds. We recovered eventually, and made our way down to the beach at Biarritz, then back to St. Jean de Luz, where Leon and Lauren tried again to order something that wasn't from the sea, resulting in Leon setting aside the large portion of his salad that was in the form of dried meats (of which he was growing tired after being in Spain and southern France for a week, and from which I helped myself liberally), and the kids ran around on the beach as the darkness settled in slowly.
The next day we had to drive all the way back to Oviedo, but we broke the trip up with a long lunch break in the exceedingly cute medieval town of Santillana del Mar and a long walk on the beach at Oyambre near Comillas, once again in our old neighborhood from 2001. There's a museum for the Altamira cave in Santillana, and their current exhibition, as you can see, was called "Sexo en Piedra," "sex in stone," which just goes to show you what lengths unscrupulous curators will go to to get people into an archeological museum.
The shot above is of the three of us at Oyambre in front of the house we rented for a month in 2001, which was our first time visiting the north of Spain together. The kids waded in the water here, but didn't swim; as you can tell, the weather wasn't great. We did some beach-combing and tide-pooling and scrambling around on rocks. Since it was no longer Quin's birthday, I was allowed to take pictures he wasn't in. Like this one of Leon with his potato rock.
Some people look for shells or fossils. I think Leon was still worried about dinner.
I'll leave you with another of those many, many pictures from the beach in Biarritz. The rain held off until we were on the last leg of the drive to Oviedo, and then it poured after Lauren and Leon and Quin headed back to Madrid on Easter Sunday. That weather was perfect for our mood, and we sat in the house all day. I miss those crazy kids already.
We planned to stop often on the trip to let the kids let off steam. Here you can see how well they got along. At least Annabel is smiling while slugging her cousin. (They're actually having a lot of fun here, and the roughhousing never got ugly the entire trip.)
This mammoth sculpture is based on one of the drawings in the cave. We couldn't resist the opportunity to continue our photo-series of posing-in-signs. Unfortunately, the photographer's skills seem to be deteriorating with each new sign. There was also a hermitage and a ruined monastery nearby, and a network of trails.
Our next stop was lunch, and we decided to revisit our old stomping grounds in Cantabria. We ate at one of the many seafood places on the water in San Vincente de la Barquera, which some faithful readers may recall visiting in 2001. After lunch we wandered up to the church, because the castle was locked up, and it turned out to be beautiful up there, high above the castle and the large winding bay, the highest point in the town, and I was amazed that we'd not visited it ten years ago. I didn't take my camera up there, but even if I had I wouldn't have been able to take pictures (inside the church) of the pilgrims on the altarpieces that looked exactly like pirates, or the relic shards of bone from St. Vicente. I did take before-and-after pictures of the bay, looking toward the Roman bridge. Before and after the tide came in, that is. These pictures also give a pretty good sense of the range of weather we had, shifting quickly from mostly sunny to mostly cloudy and back again.
By the time we left San Vicente, we felt a little urgency about getting to our lodgings for the night. This was the day that Eric was responsible for booking, and for a while there it looked like the casa rural that he'd booked was going to be as problematic as the cave trip he'd planned. But the owner of the bed and breakfast was helpful, giving us directions by phone and finally driving out in our direction to steer us on the right course. We needed all this help because the directions she provided in the first place were extremely vague, pointing us in the general direction of a rather large chunk of Pais Vasco. We were pretty sure we were in the right river valley, at least, but it was a very long river. Her first set of phone directions took us back ten kilometers to a turn-off that we'd passed, then along that road, which she said would "go up," and then we would be there. After we followed that road for what felt like a very long time, we called again, and she headed out to meet us as we continued up the road. By the time we met her we only had, as it turned out, four more kilometers to go, assuming we could manage to stay on the correct road. Yikes! But the place was beautiful, the food was good, and not even a windstorm that blew all night could put a damper on our stay. I tried to capture the wind in the photo below, which is otherwise not as scenic as it could have been.
The next morning we had a beautiful but exceedingly winding (as opposed to windy) drive to San Sebastian, where we parked far out but for free (because of the Easter weekend) and spent most of the day. The weather was spectacular, the town was packed, and we actually had trouble finding a place to eat because of the crowds. How about yet another shot of the two sweet children, in front of the famous San Sebastian beach? Aren't they adorable?
Of the many, many versions of St. Sebastian (the martyr, not the town) that we saw in churches and museums, this was one of my favorites. There's no mistaking those iconic arrows sticking out all over. Some saints are hard to identify, but not this one.
These kids aren't hard to identify either. I couldn't resist this picture of them taken in a moment when they were not being ironic or snarky or reciting lines from YouTube videos. They had a lot of steam to blow off after lunch, and sometimes a teeter-totter is just what's called for.
Can't hardly have a post on this here blog without a single bug picture, can we?
We had a bit of trouble finding a place to eat lunch, as I said, and already by the second day of the trip Lauren and Leon, who don't much like seafood, were growing alarmed at the range of meal options in Basque country. We found something for everyone at lunch, but poor Leon ended up with suckling pig at dinner that night in St. Jean de Luz, not so much because he wanted to munch on a baby animal as that he wanted something, anything, that didn't come from the water. They gave him the front half of the pig, unfortunately. Well, I guess that was unfortunate. I think he'd have preferred, not a particular part of the piglet, but just not being able to tell exactly what part of the piglet he was eating at any given moment.
Lauren was in charge of reservations in St. Jean de Luz, and found a great place with a heated pool, so even through the weather was a little chilly when we arrived, the kids had an hour or so of watery fun. Leon and I even joined them, after Leon got frustrated with the French keyboard on the computer in the lobby. I sympathized, remembering when I was tried to use email in France in 2006. I didn't take pictures in St. Jean de Luz--that's another batch of photos that I'm going to have to depend on Lauren and Leon supplying me with (hint, hint)--but I did have the camera out the next day, the Big Day, the day Quin Became a Man. We were instructed to refer to him throughout the day as Trogdor the Burninator, and we did our best. As you can tell from these two pictures of the kids on the beach at Biarritz (carefully selected from the approximately 50,060 I took of them on that beach), clearly Quin has Become a Man. You can tell from the manly shoulders. Not for the first or last time on this trip did the thought cross all of our minds that they could be siblings.
The other thought we all had was that they must be freezing. There were almost no swimmers in the water, just a bunch of surfers in wetsuits. But they were undaunted. This beach outing actually came at the end of a day during which they were occasionally quite patient, putting up with us wandering around Bayonne, which turned out to be my favorite place that we visited on the whole trip, maybe because I'd never seen it before. It was hopping on Good Friday, but less because of Holy Week than because they were in the middle of the Ham Festival. Which is the holiday, of the two, I would prefer to celebrate, myself.
I don't know what exactly produced this diabolical look on Quin's face, but it had something to do with the goat. Something wholesome, no doubt. Nothing that involved burninating. Or maybe he was just crazed from checking out the Bieb's latest haircut.
We had an unfortunate encounter with a very rude businesswoman in Bayonne, perhaps the rudest so-called "service worker" we'd ever had the bad luck to meet, but maybe she'd been driven mad by the Ham Festival crowds. We recovered eventually, and made our way down to the beach at Biarritz, then back to St. Jean de Luz, where Leon and Lauren tried again to order something that wasn't from the sea, resulting in Leon setting aside the large portion of his salad that was in the form of dried meats (of which he was growing tired after being in Spain and southern France for a week, and from which I helped myself liberally), and the kids ran around on the beach as the darkness settled in slowly.
The next day we had to drive all the way back to Oviedo, but we broke the trip up with a long lunch break in the exceedingly cute medieval town of Santillana del Mar and a long walk on the beach at Oyambre near Comillas, once again in our old neighborhood from 2001. There's a museum for the Altamira cave in Santillana, and their current exhibition, as you can see, was called "Sexo en Piedra," "sex in stone," which just goes to show you what lengths unscrupulous curators will go to to get people into an archeological museum.
The shot above is of the three of us at Oyambre in front of the house we rented for a month in 2001, which was our first time visiting the north of Spain together. The kids waded in the water here, but didn't swim; as you can tell, the weather wasn't great. We did some beach-combing and tide-pooling and scrambling around on rocks. Since it was no longer Quin's birthday, I was allowed to take pictures he wasn't in. Like this one of Leon with his potato rock.
Some people look for shells or fossils. I think Leon was still worried about dinner.
I'll leave you with another of those many, many pictures from the beach in Biarritz. The rain held off until we were on the last leg of the drive to Oviedo, and then it poured after Lauren and Leon and Quin headed back to Madrid on Easter Sunday. That weather was perfect for our mood, and we sat in the house all day. I miss those crazy kids already.
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