​Our fellow tour participants were much older on average than on our tandem trips, but most of them totally fit and definitely well-traveled.  They were all retired or still-working professionals.  It’s definitely different to be part of a group of 20, rather than 200.  Our guides were absolutely wonderful, professional and knowledgeable in different ways and worked to their strengths.  Those qualities are especially evident when they have to deal with “there’s always one” difficult traveler.  At least one person was not ready for the type of walking we did and complained to me and to others that the trip was mis-advertised as “easy”; she did not find it so.  She and her husband were also extremely negative about the food and the weather.  It truly made me wonder whatever made them sign up in the first place.  Everyone else, however, were happy, curious and hardy, all with interesting life stories.
 
The language fascinated me.  It was much more in evidence than I expected.  It’s one of the oldest languages in Western Europe, preceding the Indo-European languages with no known linguistic relatives.  Everything publicly printed (street and highway signs, menus, museum labels, etc.) were all in Euskara first and then Spanish.  The restrooms are almost all only labeled “Komunak” (no Spanish equivalent provided).  They were easy to spot after a while.  It is mandated in schools right from the kindergarten, so students grow up knowing both Euskara and Spanish.  “Tx” makes a “ch” sound and is in a lot of words.  Our guide was born in Hondarribia but lived until 17 in the U.S.  When she returned, she was spelling her name Charo, but her friends convinced her to spell it in Euskara, so she did, although she doesn’t speak it fluently.
 
The food is fresh and delicious.  It’s seasoned only with salt, pepper, garlic and onions to let the flavor of the main ingredients come through.  We had very simple and straightforward meals to very creative and fancy ones.  The pastries are exceedingly yummy.
 
It was a great trip.  Would love to go back.  It’s a big world out there.

​The next morning we said goodbye to Hondarribia and Txaro, whose turn it was to drive the van with our entire luggage to Bilbao.  David rode with us on the bus and said goodbye at the door of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum as he handed us over to our guide for the day in Bilbao.  Whoa, what a place.  All I can say is look at the pictures.  The narrative is that the museum is responsible for the renaissance of Bilbao from a grungy industrial city to a modern, livable city with a lively arts scene.  It’s a collaborative project between the government of Spain, the Basque Region, and the architect, Frank Gehry.  As we waited to get into the museum, there was a family fun run just starting with hundreds of families in red shirts.  Everyone in each family wore the same number.  So very festive.  We had a whirlwind 90 minute tour with our Scottish guide who has lived in Bilbao for the last 15 years.  A quick lunch in the hotel, then a 2-hour walking tour with him to the old city.  Very different from others we had seen.  It was Sunday afternoon and he described how families all get together for drinks before lunch and then a long lunch; hence the trash all over the streets (?!).  The young people were out there and loud!  While the older people paraded sedately in their Sunday best.  The guide left us in the old town to make our way back to the hotel.  Joe and I meandered back, stopped at a pastry shop, a pinxtos bar and got ready to pack for the trip home.
 
The flight back to Virginia the next day was as uncomfortable and eventful (for me) compared to the easy flight to Spain.   I must have picked up some food poisoning or stomach bug, as I started vomiting about half way through the fight and the rest is a blur.  Hardly remember the ride home.  Slept most of yesterday.  Yuck!!!  But it was really good to be finally in my own bed, even though I was feeling like death.  That’s definitely the place to be for that activity, as opposed to an airplane seat throwing up into a barf bag with strangers sitting inches away.

​This is the farthest northeast town in Spain, just across the Bidaso River from France on the coast of the Bay of Biscay.  While our baggage was being transported to the next hotel, we rode by bus to an open high meadow to walk part of the oldest route on the pilgrimage path El Camino (“Way of St. James”).  The views were spectacular:  the Bay of Biscay on the left (we were walking backwards on the path) and Hondarribia below with the estuary between Spain and France beyond the town.  It was a peaceful, if windy, walk.  We then took a short shuttle to the Sanctuary of Guadalupe, where resides a 15th Century Black Madonna.  More snacks from the back of the van and then a picturesque walk downhill past a series of crosses representing the Stations of the Cross, each one with a wooden kneeling plank in front.  I was walking towards the rear with the oldest of our participants, an interesting former fruit-fly researcher and overall genial character, when suddenly a barn door opened and sheep came barging out one by one, rounded a fence and rushed up to their pasture.  It was delightfully startling. 
 
We approached the walled city of Hondarribia and entered across a moat and through an ancient gate.  The hotel was on the other side of the old city, past the church and square with a palace that is now a Parador (state-sponsored Spanish hotel remodeled from castles, monasteries, etc.).  Our hotel was built into a corner of the city just adjacent to the main gate.  It’s a great town with the 800-year-old walled “old” city and the “new” city, an old fishing port.  After checking in, we took a walking tour of part of the new city and a quick rest before another very special dinner experience.
 
A “txoko” in the Basque Country is a “private, gastronomic society.” Formerly men-only, where they cook together, eat and socialize.  The story is that in the old days women welcomed this tradition to get the men out of the house.  Another version says that the societies have ruined many a marriage.  Who knows? In these days, women are welcome to dine with the men and some are even members, including our guide, Txaro, a native Hondarribian.  She arranged for the first time on this particular 3-year-old VBT tour to reserve her club’s space and recreate this experience for us.  Several participants volunteered to help her with the meal preparation, while the less hearty of us rested up for the festivities.  We had a wonderful evening.  The club had a large kitchen and a long table for eating family style.  It was a risk for Txaro, but with the few helpers she had, she pulled it off.  Her 90-year-old mother lives in the center of the old town and had greeted us from her balcony as we initially walked into the old city.  One of the “guest cooks” got to see her apartment as he accompanied Txaro to round up the fish and other ingredients she had stored there. Of course, the grand old gal joined us for dinner in the club.  As we arrived, Txaro and our fellow travelers were finishing up preparing the salad, the tortilla, chicken and then cooking the main fish from the region, hake, or merlusa in Spanish.  We had a grand old time with of course too much food.  Our oldest buddy, John, bought some cartons of gazpacho as an appetizer, and there was plenty of wine as usual.  Blessedly we had fruit salad for dessert!  Across the hall we could hear part of the club members at their singing group practice.  At the end of the evening, we all pitched in with cleaning up.  I realized then that it was a missed opportunity not to help with the cooking, but it’s always a hard balance on these trips between “doing it all” and getting rest when possible.
 
The next day, we walked to the ferry to cross the river into Hendaye, France.  We started out in town walking along the beach promenade, then headed up a dirt path again overlooking the Bay of Biscay, through meadows and some forest. At one point, David, our walking guide that day, took us down a ‘short-cut’, which was a brambly path and across a stream, shortly after which, the path just stopped.  Unbeknownst to him, it hadn’t been maintained and was just too overgrown from the spring rain to continue.  Never mind, we backtracked and took the normal path that worked just as well.  I felt especially happy on this walk and had a thought that I was getting in touch with my inner Girl Scout.  I hadn’t realized that I had missed her.  We got wet, we got muddy, we enjoyed nature.  It was a really pleasant feeling, and made me think of my adventuresome mother.  Finally, we walked on a stretch of sand on the beach before coming to the lovely French town of St. Jean-de-Luz.  Luis XIV was married to Maria Theresa in the largest Basque church there, but we didn’t have time to stop in.  We did, however, have time to duck into a crowded café for a Croque Monsieur (ham and cheese French style) and then grab a glace (ice cream) on our way to the train station and across a bridge for our return to Hondarribia.
 
That night they took us to a wonderful pintxos bar where we sat outside and stuffed ourselves yet again.  Night after night, I said to myself, “I will never need to eat again.” 
 
Our last day in Hondarribia was a very rainy one.  We had lucked out on most of the previous days, defying the rainy weather predictions, but not today.  Joe chose to stay in the hotel and dry and take care the beginnings of a head cold, while I headed out with the group for our last walk in the countryside.  We walked through the outskirts of the new town to the Plalaundi Ecological Park, which also took us on pieces of El Camino.  On the way out of town we wandered past really picturesque villages with impeccable spring gardens all laid out and sprouting the first green veggies.  It poured.  I am so grateful for my hiking boots, which we bought as soon as we retired 2 years ago for our trip to visit our friends in the California Sierras.  They were daily footwear on this trip and lived up to their waterproof label, not to mention being super-supportive and comfy.  Love them so much.  If they hadn’t gotten too muddy before, they came back to the hotel with an inch of mud on the bottom.  The girl scout was soaked and filthy and tired and very happy.
 
That night:  MORE FOOD.  Our official farewell dinner.  The owner of the hotel is a longtime friend of Txaro and a good cook.  He cooked a lot of stuff for us to eat.  The first courses were pre-prepped, but he gave us a great demonstration of cutting a whole fish and cooking the hake in green sauce.  I just kept groaning as course followed course.  It’s exhausting!

​After less than 6 hours of sleep, finishing our packing, and another in a daily string of opulent breakfasts, we set out on a walk to the San Sebastian train station.  A 45-minute ride through beautiful green countryside took us to the small town of Tolosa on the Oria River.  It’s a quaint medieval town known for being a trade hub and the former capital of the Basque province of Gipuzkoa and now for a tasty black bean!  As we walked through the town, it happened that someone (me) needed a bathroom break.  So the group stopped at a corner and Txaro went into a café to ask if we could use their facilities.  They said yes, so I led the way in and confronted the restroom door.  While the rest of the group was lining up behind me, I tried the handle, pushing and pulling, and nothing happened.  Of course, I decided that someone was already in there.  Waited, waited, tried the door several times.  Eventually, a local man strode past the line, and easily slid the door sideways and went in (aaah a pocket door).  Bathroom lesson #1:  see if the door slides sideways rather than opens “normally.” Duh.  Good running joke on me for the rest of the trip.  But at least everyone who needed to got to go.  Yellow arrows on the side of buildings or posts along the way on El Camino, “the Way of St. James,” marked the rest of the walk in Tolosa. 
 
We were shuttled by the van and taxis from Tolosa into the tiny village square of Bidania, population 537, where we were issued our numbered set of metal, adjustable walking sticks and taught how to use them.  It took a few minutes of practice, but we quickly got the hang of them and could easily see how they would help tremendously with the hiking.  We set out on a 2.3 mile walk through beautiful farm land and forests with a steady grade that got quite steep a couple of times, but all on paved country roads with hardly any cars passing.  We ended up at an old family pig farm, now kept alive by the current generation of the family, struggling to stay afloat raising pigs along with day jobs.  They raise the only remaining breed of 3 unique to the Basque region:  Euskal Txerria.  They are comical pigs with short legs and big wide triangle ears that flop right in front of their eyes above extremely expressive snouts.  The pigs are raised only 14 per hectare and feed naturally on chestnuts, acorns, hazelnuts and grass.  We watched a few munching away under the trees and then got to see the sow shed with three or four sows suckling their litters of 6-8 piglets, and one in labor.  Pello, our host, took one of the piglets out.  No one else stepped up, but I couldn’t wait to hold it.  It was a sweet, sweet baby.  For a short time it let me hold it peacefully; it smelled as good as a human baby, in a piggy sort of way.  When I tried to turn it around so the group could see its little face, it went crazy squealing and struggling in my arms like an angry cat.  Back into the pen it went with mom and siblings.  Pello talked for a while about the importance of keeping the old method of raising pigs, as opposed to the large industrial farms, but it is clearly not easy.
 
Lunch was provided back at the farmhouse in a rustically beautiful large room on the bottom floor.  We were served the end products of the farm:  thinly sliced Iberian ham and several other kinds of cured pork (chorizo, loo and salchichon).  They were all delicious (I’m not a sausage fan, but this was different) along with pintxos, super-fresh salad, Spanish tortilla (basically a ubiquitous Spanish potato, egg and onion frittata).  Dessert was a yummy, creamy local confection.  It was a beautiful meal in an idyllic setting.  We figured that the family’s partnership with VBT and other tour groups is also a part of the current generation’s ability to keep the old traditions alive and keep their land.
 
We were given the option to walk back the 2.3 miles to the village plus one more up the hill to our hotel, or ride in the van.  Joe’s knee was starting to bother him, so he took the van and I walked.  It was just so beautiful and peaceful.
 
Our hotel owners were another young generation working their butts off to re-establish their heritage after the disaster for their parents that was the Spanish Civil War.  Our host was born in France after his family fled the Franco invasion of the north and the annexation of the family home and family-built 100-year-old, opulent mini cathedral that made up the village square.  When they returned from exile, his parents were unable to reclaim their home, which had been sold by the government to someone else, so they bought a 17th century palace overlooking the village.  In 2007, our host, after what sounds like intense negotiations with his parents, began renovating the property into a modern boutique hotel.  The story is that his mom objected to the modern style furnishings of the lobby and rooms and after much discussion, agreed to decorate one of the rooms in the old style.  Of course, no one wanted to stay there, and after the mom herself spent a night in that room, the issue was settled and that one, too, was re-designed into a sleek, comfortable and beautiful room like the one we stayed in.  The view out of our window was tranquil green hills and fields and we could hear the bell gently ringing around the neck of the donkey just outside.  Dinner options that night were to stay for only a bar menu at the hotel or get a lift in the van to the nearest restaurant another village away.  All but two or three people decided to stay.  So, the staff took our orders individually and proceeded to bring our orders cooked to order one at a time. We were served about two hours later, but it was worth it.  Just pintxos and salad, but delicious. 
 
If you ever find yourself in Bidania, Spain, the Iriarte Jauregia Hotel is the place to stay!
 
The next day’s walk was through forest, hills and dales on a dirt path to a restaurant on a hill with a gorgeous view of the valleys below.  We were served as a first course a Basque specialty, alubias de Tolosa, or Tolosa beans with chili peppers from Ibarra.  The beans are so beloved in this area they have their own week-long festival, the “week of the bean” or “babarrunaren aste” in Basque. The beans were followed by salad, tortilla, fish, and chicken. We drank traditional sidra (hard apple cider), poured through a special spout, and held about six inches above the glass. You’re only supposed to pour what you can drink in one swallow to fully experience the special fizz.  Wine, naturally, was also available as it is at every meal except breakfast in the Basque Country (I guess in all of Spain).  After the morning’s 5+ mile walk through the forest, I, too, decided to take the van back to the hotel, rather than retrace the route back through the forest.
 
The hotel’s kitchen and its “creative and renowned” chef presented dinner that night.  It WAS creative, beautiful and absolutely delicious.   It was a real unexpected haute cuisine experience in this remote palace in a remote Basque village.  What a night!

​An uneventful morning flight took us to the Bilbao airport with a transfer by bus to beautiful San Sebastian for the beginning of our official VBT walking tour.  The Hotel Londres y Inglaterra is a fantastic old hotel, obviously built for English vacationers at the turn of the 19th century, updated and lovely.  Our room overlooked La Concha beach with its elegant promenade for walking and with great bike lanes.  We decided to grab something simple to eat in the hotel bar with a view of the beach, and then take a short and lovely walk along the promenade up into the old city, where we were instantly arrested by a gorgeous pastry shop.  We bought the most delicious almond cake EVER, and gobbled it down right there (well, I did take a quarter back to the hotel, but never did have time to eat it).  At 4 that afternoon, we met our guides and fellow walkers for a brief orientation meeting.  David is a full-time adventure tour guide of all descriptions, born in Cape Verde, but grew up and is still from Lisbon, Portugal.  Txaro, (pronounced “Charo”—more about the Basque language later) his co-guide, is a native of the Basque Country who spent her entire childhood in the United States, returning to her home town at age 17.  She has retained her American accent and owns and runs an English school in addition to her tour guide gigs.  The group turned out to be 20 in all, variously from Florida, California, Washington State, Oregon, South Carolina, Maryland (eastern shore), and Arizona.  Most were couples, with one pair of sisters, and one pair of best friends traveling together.  The average age of the group was probably 65-70.
 
After the meeting we ventured out again into the old city, as usual, all pedestrian narrow streets with shops and restaurants on the ground floors and apartments above with colorful flowery window boxes.  We went into a restaurant recommended by the hotel, only to be turned away initially.  When we told them we would only be an hour, they showed us to a great table for two near a group of our other fellow travelers who got a table in the same way.  Locals, of course, eat very late and so the tables were reserved for them.  Often the restaurants don’t even open until 8 or 9PM, but this resturant was in the back of a busy and crowded tapas bar (pintxos in Basque, pronounced “pinchos”) and was open at 7.  Seems smart to me, as there were plenty of people (tourists) like us who wanted a full meal that would terminate before midnight.  We had a delicious meal of fish and salad and I unknowingly ordered a glass of white wine that is unique and famous to the region we were visiting.  It’s called txokoli (pronounced, of course, “chocoli”—beginning to see the pattern?).  It’s not too dry, has a little effervescence and quickly became my go-to wine for the whole trip.
 
After a much-needed night’s rest from the hectic pace in Madrid, we gathered in the lobby for our first official walk of the tour.  On a bright sunny morning, we walked along the promenade toward a palace of Isabella II who wanted private access directly to the beach, so she had a hill built for the hoi-poloi to walk to so she could pass directly via a tunnel to her little spot of private beach.  We continued around the bay to meet the van.  On each day of our tour, Txaro and David alternated days, one walking with us, and the other in the van, our support vehicle.  So every morning we had a snack break in the middle of our walk.  They put out on the back of the van a positively wonderful spread of fresh and dried fruits, nuts, cookies, granola bars, rice cakes, juices, water and dark chocolate. So we stood around and munched away to get fortified to walk up to a funicular at the bottom of Monte Igueldo on the far west side of the bay.  The red funicular cars looked old fashioned but were comfortable and trundled us up to a village/amusement park (complete with a House of Horrors), and a very fancy hotel.  After a brief opportunity for photo ops and a bathroom break, back down we rode in the funicular to continue our walk back around the Concha Bay beach, past the hotel and up into the old city.  The whole group stopped at a pintxos bar for a snack before a choice of climbing a big hill to Castillo de la Monte, a fortification built to protect San Sebastian during the Middle Ages.  On the top of the hill also stands a Franco-built statue of Jesus (controversial to the locals of course, who didn’t need concrete statues imposed on the natural beauty of their bay).  David said it might be taken down some day, but for now it remains keeping its eye on the frolicking beach-goers below.  We chose to skip the climb to the castle and Jesus and head back to the hotel for a little rest before the evening festivities.
 
So, we gathered at 6PM for what we thought would be a quick aperitif before the group dinner in the hotel, but not so fast.  We drank and chatted for about an hour and then Txaro began passing around a clipboard chart for selecting our courses for dinner.  There were at least 6 choices for the 1st course, 8 choices for the entrée and four or five for desert.   You can imagine how long it took for 20 people to look them over, think about it and check off their selections!  I thought it was great that they were able to basically offer us the entire menu ahead of time, but some others grumbled that it was ridiculous that we were offered choices at all!  Joe and I figured out that the over-long “cocktail hour” was because the restaurant didn’t actually start serving until after 8.  Dinner was fine and sociable as we began to get to know our guides and a few of our new traveling companions.  It was only as dinner finished, close to 11 o’clock, that we were told our morning would begin by having our bags ready outside our door by 7:30.  Yikes.  Several people expressed mild outrage that we weren’t told earlier, as if we would have spent any part of our last day in San Sebastian pre-packing.  We are pretty much used to even earlier calls on our tandem trips, so we just roll with it.

​We had an unexpectedly “comfortable” flight in coach from Dulles to Heathrow overnight.  Lucky me had a row of three seats all to myself; Joe had one empty seat next to him.  Of course, the seasoned traveler that he is, he headed off to sleep with his comfy neck pillow as soon as we took off and skipped dinner so as to get the maximum of 5 hours.   I, on the other hand, too jazzed to try to go to sleep at 7:PM, waited for dinner and then, at about 8:30, curled up across the three seats and slept for maybe 3 hours.  We had a Keystone Cops layover at Heathrow, as we got confused about which terminal we needed for our connecting flight.  After two different bus rides around the airport, we ended up where we began just in time to board our Iberia Air flight to Madrid, an uneventful 2 and a half hours. 
 
Once in Madrid, we began to spot our fellow VBT walkers at baggage claim.  Actually, Joe spotted a man wearing an old VBT T-shirt two rows ahead of us on the plane and so we found someone on our trip even earlier.  As on one of our previous trips, the first couple we met turned out to be one of the most compatible, at least so far.  After we found our bus driver, we (now 5 couples) had to wait an hour for the last couple to arrive on a different plane.  Then we loaded our luggage and ourselves onto a comfy bus which took us on a 30-minute bus to a wonderful hotel in the center of Madrid, basically across the boulevard from El Prado Museum, and across the square from another important art museum, the Theissen. 
 
After getting settled, we met our VBT liason, Alina, for a quick orientation to Madrid, and then were off on our own.  We headed up a side street and found a recommended old Cevezeria/Tapas place to eat a quick meal of salmon and mushrooms on toast (tostadas in Madrid), along with the local beer.  Alina had said that the museums were free from 6-9 PM, so we headed over to El Prado after eating.  Not surprisingly, the line stretched too far down the block to see the end, so we decided to try the Theissen.  No luck there either, as it was NOT free and closed at 7.  We decided instead to walk to the “Plaza Mayor,” basically the Times Square of Madrid, except without all the electronic screens and neon.  The weather was not ideal (drizzly and grey) and the plaza was a crowded place with street performers, human statues and dress-up characters inviting pictures for a fee.  Fighting fatigue, we walked back to the hotel and tried to stay awake until at least 9:30.
 
On our only full day in Madrid, we had a break in the weather and got into El Prado after maybe a 40-minute wait in line.  What an overwhelming place (like the Louvre in Paris)!  We managed to hit the high spots in our two-plus hours there:  Goya, Rembrant, El Greco, and others too numerous to mention.  We came back to the hotel to regroup before walking to lunch at the Palacio Ciebeles, a lovely restaurant at the top of a government building, previously (duh) a palace.  It was too rainy to eat on the terrace—boo.  However we had a great lunch indoors with such friendly staff.  Of course, that’s a sure thing while traveling with Joseph who charms everyone, in this case, our server, Isabella and the chef, Javier Munoz, who, by the time we left, gave us his card and a recommendation for a restaurant in San Sebastian where his friend works:  “Just show him this card and he will take care of you!”  We managed to catch a sunny moment for a snapshot of the city with Isabelle from the tower after lunch. 
 
We then hoofed it down the Aveneida del Prado to the Museum Reina Sofia and walked right in at 6:05.  I, being the senior citizen, got in for free, and Joe (one year shy), paid half price.  This is the place for Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali (see a picture of “The Face of the Great Masturbator” in the photo section) and sculptures by Miro, among many, many others.  Of course, again we only had time and energy for the highlights, the highest of which was Picasso’s masterpiece, “Guernica,” depicting the horrors of the German bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War in which the victims were mostly women and children.  It’s an amazing work of art and a powerful condemnation of the effect of war on innocents.
 
Again the rain let up to let us have an exhausted but festive walk back to the hotel down the boulevard.  Young people in Madrid seem to like to party on a strange-looking vehicle with bar stools on both sides and bicycle pedals beneath their feet.  We paralleled the progress of a bachelorette party having a raucous time while the driver kept it on the road and turned to dance for the ladies at stop lights.  We had noticed a party on a similar vehicle full of men who had actually, unlike the women, figured out that it would move even if they didn’t pedal.  Check out the photo in our photo section (a video if the upload speed allows). It’s hilarious.
 
A nightcap at the bar consisted of us ordering what we thought would be a regular drink. But no.  The waiter brought the bottles to the table and poured and poured with no jigger in sight.  You can see the result in the photos.  Fortunately we afterward were able to make it up to the room to pack for our flight in the morning to Bilbao for the official start of our VBT walking tour.