 Here we go: this is where our real European journey starts in earnest. Wherever we go in Europe has to start with the Eurostar. Surprise, surprise, the most expensive "mileage" is that which originates in London and passes through le Tunnel. Eurostar is also, from our experience, the least reliable and the most expensive km for km. We each had an Interrail Pass that theoretically allowed us 10 days of 1st class travel for "free" (i.e. included the price of a pass for two months). Except there IS one little catch: travel in the top class trains (TGV/inOu! in France, Eurostar through the Channel etc) requires that you purchase a seat ticket over and above the Interrial Pass. First class seats on Eurostar for both of us in both directions cost an additional €80 (approx €0.11 per km) and for both of us in both directions from Paris to Hendaye cost an additional €44 (approx €0.05 per km)[1]. These were our prices when we booked them. If you want the latest almost infinite detail, you may like to follow the trail on one of the most comprehensive internet sites known to man or beast[2]. Just one little note, too: of all the 11 "overground" trains we caught during our travels, only one was cancelled/delayed. I do believe it was the Eurostar return from Paris to St Pancras.. Everything about French trains was not altogether jolly, though. We had booked our overnight Paris hotel in Montparnasse so that we could have a relaxed evening and next morning before we had to board our inOu! heading South. The outside of the station was visible almost from the moment we left the IBIS. Finding our way into the building and further into the bowels of the station to catch our train were rather fraught and probably took another half hour. C'est la Vie, we got the train and were finally on our way to our holiday-proper. Shan even had time to stroll around the concourse sporting her baggy trousers while the 10.11 to Hendaye shone brightly on the screen and the Fledge Wine[3] sticker on my suitcase got wind of its eventual destination in the Douro Valley. The inOu! train was typically prompt and we arrived in Hendaye on the button at 14:47. The little stopping train from this French town into Spain gave us a bit of a preview of crossing Spanish borders with its EU neighbours. Logically, the inOu! would have trotted the last 25 km to San Sebastián but we soon grew to realise that nothing was that simple with trains in Spain. Apart from lugging luggage from the main station to a little side line less than 100m away, it wasn't too bad and were in San Sebastián by 4 PM, lugging our luggage to the old Town. Above [top to bottom, l-r]: Me with the train's speed indicator in the top left hand corner; we flashed through French estuary towns on our way to Donostia-San Sebastián; dragging our bags through the cobbled Old Town en route to the hotel we spotted our first destination of the many, many bars in the pintxos zone ... the posher ones only opened, generally, at 7PM; but there were oases that stayed awake all day. Our pad in Donostia / San Sebastián We'd been given a fabulous upgrade[4] on our apartment, from one room facing backwards on to an alley to a penthouse suite with a sweeping view of the glorious San Sebastián (SS) bay and waterfront. We'd been to SS a few years earlier but stayed way out of town and now we were in the prime spot in the Old Town with its sea views and glorious pintxos[5] nightlife. We'd deliberately gone for something a bit special on the first couple of nights of our holiday proper and the SANSEBay Boutique Hotel definitely didn't disappoint. We were allowed a small interlude to settle in our room before reporting for complimentary glasses of Txakoli and an introduction to SS by a local member of staff. The Old Town has a bewildering array of pintxo Bars, many of them extraordinarily popular and our hosts had compiled a list of their 11 favourites for guests, one or two we already knew about and the others promising a whole new adventure. I think we managed 7 over two evenings and one lunchtime. The trick with pintxos is theoretically to have one small course in each and then move on to the next. This is an impossible feat. The array of delicious dishes is legendary so we seldom escaped with less than three. The only exception was La Vina where one course was the order of the day but we've been there 3 times now for the fabled burnt cheesecake. What a way to round off an evening. The only other thing we needed from our gracious hostess was advice on how to transfer ourselves from SS to Bilbao. In the first blog of this series we spoke of the snail-like progress of local trains across the Northern Spanish Coast. Turns out Spain has a highly sophisticated and very reasonably-priced bus network that goes at least three-times as fast as the local trains. Pintxos are go ... We were freed to pursue pintxos persistently. Above [top-bottom, l-r]: Shan and I were pretty much first through the door of the Tamboril at 7 PM, having doorstepped the place 5 minutes early and I am toasting her through the window on to the alley; these ladies were a little late and are looking wistfully through the same piece of glass at 7:20; there comes a point when its is necessary to move on ... here to the Borda Berri (BB); The manager was extraordinary in the way she never missed a beat serving patrons in the order they entered the bar; delicious ravioli was one of our BB three; and then we found some new friends who insisted we share their sublime, juicy entrecôte; les Belles starting off a long 2022 afternoon, mainly at the Bergara Bar; two years later and Shan is sporting a double portion of the esteemed cheesecake. Our first night of pintxoing started pretty much bang on at 7 PM to make sure we could make it into the 2024 Michelin listed joint just off the SS Old Town's Plaza de la Constitucion. We were lucky we did and ensconced ourselves in the window looking smugly out into the street. The pintxos were too delicious for us to depart after just one each so we hung in for three rounds before feeling guilty enough to make way for other punters. We didn't have to walk far to our next bar on the list, the Borda Berri. By this stage we didn't need our list to point to the selected establishments; they were the ones with the doors straining against the buttocks of the aspirant punters now trying simultaneously to shelter from the rain that had recently started. According to our list, this bar's customer service was ensured by the manager who was renowned for never allowing a queue jumper (the queue was by no means linear) to push in. And so it came to pass and Shan and I agreed that it would be wise to order three pinxtos to share. Yum. Now, strictly speaking pintxos are not supposed to constitute a main meal but 6 different platters each had pretty much filled us up ... definitely if we were going to finish off the evening just up the road by revisiting our experience two years' previously of "burnt cheesecake" at La Viña . Shan and Kerry[6] had insisted on that occasion that they'd not have any and then proceeded to eat half of mine. On this September's excursion my dear wife was nowhere near us much of a shrinking violet as the pics above will testify. This first evening had been accompanied by some pretty heavy rain and while it made the experience in the packed bars even more cosy, we were thankful our hotel was not much more than a stone's throw from the main attractions. Another day in paradise A massive storm played out through our Velux windows through the middle of the night and we woke up to a dull and drizzly day. Time for some shopping and sorting out our travel arrangements for the next day, requiring a walk through the shopping district and across the river into the station. Before lunch of course! Above [top-bottom, l-r]: Looking out on a rainy day from our eyrie perched above the bay and the Old Town; Shan's new raincoat enjoys an outing across the river Urumea; there is a subtle shift in architecture when you cross the Urumea to Gros; one of the ornate 4 corner towers of the Maria Kristina bridge that forms a gateway to the Donostia town centre when leaving the central station; the Teatro Principal lends the Old Town a certain Bohemian air; the Bar Antonio Boulevard's glossy facade graces its terrace on the boulevard joining the Gros to the bay.. Above [top-bottom, l-r]: inside the Bar Antonio Boulevard provides a gentle setting for those of us who like to lunch, as many Donostians do; often accompanied by a dog in the middle of the day; others are lured into the bountiful delicatessens; your guess is as good as mine but there is a chain in Spain of these that evidently are dressed appropriately every morning! Good time for a Siesta to prepare for the second evening's foray into Pintxoland. This time we were sort of going to break with tradition and try one of the new-fangled bars where a table could be booked for a meal. Last night in Donostia-SS And lo, when we emerged, the thoroughfares of the Old Town had been transformed by sunshine. SS has a lot of rain - roughly 1,500 mm (59 in) annually. It had started mizzling almost the moment we'd got off the train the night before, climaxed through the night and drizzled throughout most of the day. Now the pavement cafés were thronging with punters. We raised a metaphorical glass to serendipity that we had made a reservation at the Ssua Arde Donostia for the first part of our evening. It was one of the few where booking was welcomed on our list of 11 recommendations from our hostess at the SANSEBay . In much of Spain people look at you weirdly if you arrive expecting to eat before 8:30 PM. Even then, if you do arrive a 8:30, you'll be the first. Some time between 9 and 10 is the norm. I seem to recall that we'd booked at Ssua for 8:30, counting on the odd sharpener or two beforehand. We hadn't counted on the sunshine. Every bar with casual, outside seating was heaving at 7:00. No worries, we thought, Ssua had a bar as one walked in so sharpeners could be enjoyed for 90-120 minutes before we sat down to eat. This was theoretically true but, at 7:00, our chosen hostelry was a wasteland. No-one else huddled around a bottle of ardo zuri lehorra[7] or anything else, including vino blanco seco. The staff didn't seem all that pleased to see us either. Neither did I ingratiate myself by grinningly asking for "uno bano bino blanco seco, por favor", which for 49 years I had thought, and convinced Shan, meant "one glass of dry white wine please" while it really meant "one bath of dry white ???? please". Either my intervening Spanish/Basque interlocutors had been polite or sadistic? Some had delivered a glass of dry white wine, others a glass of sherry ... I had just assumed it was my poor enunciation in Spanish. We did eventually manage to extract a bottle of marvellous dry white from the counter and retired, chastened to a small table in the bar. Another couple arrived a while later and were taken to a restaurant table deeper inside the establishment. We asked if we could also be taken to our table and the staff happily obliged. W carried on drinking our wine in a crowd of 4 and eventually ordered our first course just after 8:30. Above [top-bottom, l-r]: even the casual bar just down from our hotel had opened; and all the bars in in the Plaza de la Constitucion were rammed; there is a lot of meat[8] in the amazing Spanish/Basque cuisine as our first and second courses at Ssua reveal. The half-eaten food in the first picture above is testament to the alacrity with which we consumed it before a bit of a pause and some exquisite ribeye. The night was building up a momentum and we felt obliged after our splendid mains to make a bigger dent into our list of 11. We headed off for Txepetxa but decided en route that the time had passed that evening to get stuck into some anchovies so we swerved away to the Bar Sport, which we had bypassed earlier due to the huge crowd ballooning from the door. This time was a little quieter but the atmosphere didn't quite float our boat. "Come on, we need a swansong in La Vina," one of us said to the other. The other didn't demur and off we trotted. Above [top-bottom, l-r]: this is it; we made some more young friends; Shan eyeballing the staff to try to score an outside table; outmanoeuvred by an American on tour. When we did eventually turn our eyes away from the Old Town and its pintxo bars, it would, without doubt, have been anticlimactic to march unceremoniously back to the hotel. A stroll was required to complete the balmy evening and we meandered through quiet streets and along the waterfront to drink in the fine night air which we'd been so rudely denied by the previous evenings's deluge.  Above [top-bottom, l-r]: dead straight narrow streets lend an aura to a post-prandial stroll; one or two nightclubs with smoking restrictions; a grand hotel and restaurant grace the promenade; a young couple sharing a romantic interlude on the seawall[9] having arrived on their monocycles; the waterfront surmounted the beacon that is a lit up representation of Christ, the Monumento al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús attached to the Motako Gaztelua[10] on top of the mountain. . Moving day - off to Bilbao It was with mixed feelings that we cleared out our loft and set off with our wheelie-cases for Bilbao. A city we hadn't visited before, with so many new things to see, but SS was becoming an old friend and we felt as if we were forsaking an affair we had just started. And the sun was shining. Now there was a short walk to the station, and a bus to catch, for the next important step in our adventure Above [top-bottom, l-r]: sunshine edged the grandeur from our rooftop vigil over the bay and the mountain foothills behind; a last glance backwards at the opulent dwellings reflected in the Urumea; the opulent quirkiness of Bilbao was not going disappoint as we wheeled our way from the bus station to the jewel of the city's Old Town, the contradictorily named Plaza Nueva, where we had accommodation reserved.
Coming next Wow, Bilbao. Some of the grandeur of San Sebastián juxtaposed with the architectural flare lighting up the Guggenheim. [Endnotes]:
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