We've spent the second week of our trip in San Sebastian, a resort town on the northwest coast of Spain in the Basque country. I think most of us agree that this week in San Sebastian is even a little bit better than the last one in Sitges; the temperature is not so hot (but still good beach weather, at least the first couple of days), we're in the center of a city so it's not a big walk to go places, and the beach out our door involves people with clothes on. San Sebastian is also just really beautiful with an old promenade stretching two miles along the beach, lush mountains all around and some of the old architecture that makes it all seem so romantic and distinguished. We've been having a lot of fun.
We've visited various "unremarkable" cathedrals according to our guides, which seem quite remarkable to us Americans. We had a couple great beach days (look at the pics--I've never seen a beach this crowded at low tide!). The beach even had rafts that you could swim to and diving boards and water slides off the rafts into the ocean. The promenade has a carousel on it that Tucker loves--his favorite is the spinning tea cup which he can spin so fast he made Austin feel really ill. On top of a hill overlooking town is a small castle that has a section as old as the 12th century.
Yesterday was a rainy day and we visited Tucker's first aquarium which was surprisingly good. At one point a worker got in one of the tanks to work and Tucker sat on my lap and watched her for ages. We haven't had tons of great restaurant food on our trip (a lot of cafes with okay to good food) but yesterday we had an amazing seafood lunch at the port. Mmmmmmm. Every night a different family has rotated cooking dinner for the whole group of 18 of us and I think our earliest night here has been leaving the family party at 11 pm (and remember, Austin and I are the boring ones--we never shut anything down). :)
Another big highlight was visiting my great-grandmother's village in the mountains north of Pamplona in a little Basque village named Linzoain. House is a big deal to the Basques, bigger even than genealogy or last name. What house you come from is essentially your heritage, so it was really neat to find her actual house (she lived in the house that has the name of the town on it!). People still live in the house and the village was really neat with a Basque pelota court and narrow streets and courtyards and lots of window boxes with bright red flowers. The uniformity of the architecture and the neatness of it makes a big impression. When my aunt and uncle and cousins went to look at the house in the early evening, the owner of the house was just arriving home from work and gave them a tour, telling them what was original and what was not and giving them cokes and beers--when I get the pics, I'll post them!
Of course, there have been some low lights to the vacation as well. The day we visited Linzoain we went to Pamplona, but Tucker had his first just disaster of a day. He had taken a late nap the day before and gone to sleep late and gotten up early and was just tired. We got to Pamplona just as he was about to fall asleep in the car, and he responded by throwing a tantrum that he basically didn't recover from the entire time we were in Pamplona. I think we were only able to walk about half a mile from the car, to a mediocre cafe with laughably bad service. (At least the cafe was strikingly beautiful--it was one of Hemmingway's hangouts.)
But that was actually the better of the lowlights of that day. The truly worst experience of the trip happened later, after Tucker was in bed for the night. He was (finally) asleep and we were hanging out after dinner at the adjoining apartment with all the family. The two apartments share a foyer and there's an exterior door past the foyer. We've been essentially using the two villas as one and not ever shutting the individual apartment doors, just shutting the main foyer door. That meant that when the wind whipped through our apartment (where Tucker was sleeping) and slammed our apartment door shut at 10:30 at night, all the keys to that door were safely inside the apartment. We were locked out at 10:30 pm, with Tucker inside. In Spain. Arghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thankfully, we were able to reach the person managing the apartment who sent over someone to unlock the door within 20 minutes, and Tucker slept through the whole thing. But I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the night... given the pace of service in Spain it felt like it could easily have been 12-14 hours to find a key or a locksmith or to get someone to answer their phone and respond. Thank you, Lord!!!!
