In honor of Cinco de Mayo we decided to move to a Spanish speaking country. The next stop on our plan is Galicia in Northern Spain. Last night we had a debate as to whether to get on the road and jump down to Spain where rain is forecast for the next couple of days, or stay in the Bourdeaux region in France where the weather is supposed to be perfect. After a lot of debate Spain won.
The drive today was about 330km’s that was uneventful. It took a little longer than planned because we ran into a full on urban traffic jam getting around Bourdeaux. It took roughly an hour to cover about 18km’s (12 miles). After getting out of Bourdeaux our route followed the A63 which is like an interstate, but with tolls. The key is that it is only tolled in some areas. So Greta would jump on the A63 when it was free and then have us use local roads that ran parallel when it was tolled. By doing that it saved us €27 in tolls over about 200km’s. Just as I congratulated her for doing a good job, she suddenly decided to route us right thru the heart of Bayonne and Biarritz where we slowed down to a crawl. When I chastised her for her bad judgement, she retorted that if I wasn’t such a cheap skate and willing to pay a toll we would be tooling down the A63 at 95kph instead of crawling thru Biarritz at 15kph.
We arrived in Orio Spain about 3pm. We are in a campground that we had fond memories from our first trip to Spain. It is a small town with a nice beach and a relatively modern city center. The old town is quite small and completely dominated by modern buildings and infrastructure all around it. Despite that we enjoy the vibe of the place.
This is Basque country thru and thru. There are virtually no Spanish signs in town. The conversations are again almost exclusively in Basque, even amongst the children and walking around town we heard as much English as Spanish being spoken. Basque is a tongue twister of a language and Ton and I had fun trying to pronounce the names on the signs.
