After the Texas celebrations and a brief stint in New York with friends we flew to Barcelona in mid May, our first international destination! We had a few days at a lovely little hostel called Lolita, and we basically just walked around the entire city. Walking around was a good option because we needed to get some prep in for several weeks of walking along the Camino de Santiago, plus we didn’t really want to spend too much time at tourist attractions since we had been to several of those spots on a previous visit. We got some good views and good exercise on Montjuïc, visited the beach, and ate and drank our way through those first few days in Spain.
After that whirlwind mini trip, we moved on to San Sebastián where we would stay for over a week. Laura had signed up for Spanish classes and Javi rented a surfboard for the week. We stayed at a brand new surf hostel and settled into a nice routine. The pintxos scene at night there was wild, with all kinds of yummy delights and party people. We also got really lucky with the weather and had several hot and lazy days on the beaches. As our start date for the Camino was approaching we got a few good walks in (but mostly ate and drank of course). San Sebastián is beautiful and lively, and reminded us a bit of San Francisco – a pretty coastal city with good food, views, nightlife, (mostly good) weather and a creative vibe.
On our last Saturday there we rented a car and traveled south, stopping in Bilbao where we briefly visited the area around Guggenheim museum, and then moving on to the Cave of El Castillo, which is home to 40,000+ year old cave art! It was incredible to witness in person, and definitely fit in with one of our developing themes in our travels – visiting ancient places and learning about human evolution and history. We returned from our day trip with a heightened fascination with ancient cave art and what it can tell us about the development of human culture and civilization.
It was sad to leave San Sebastián as we had developed a nice little life there. Laura was enjoying her classes and Javi his surfing, but it was also exciting to get closer to starting the Camino de Santiago. In 2013 we did a portion of the Camino with Javi’s family and since then we had been talking about having the opportunity to walk the whole thing. At the end of May we hopped on a train to France to start our trekking adventure to Santiago de Compostella!