Wow! Almost 3 weeks have been gone since our last entry. Time has been flying; probably because of so many impressions and new adaptions. I need to keep up better with the blog!

We loved San Sebastián. It is a beautiful cosy town with a lot of historical buildings and very sociable people. The pintxos (the basque name for tapas) are unbelievably diverse and delicious. One says they’re the best tapas in Spain. We’ll see and let you know if we find better ones somewhere. But I have my doubts. The locals definitely like their pintxos. They enjoy them for their looooong lunch break as well as in the evening as an appetizer. Literally pintxos fit any time of the day and always with a beer or some local wine. We adapated quickly. 🙂

The first week in San Sebastián was heavenly. The weather was gorgeous and no swell was coming into the bay, which made it easy to go ashore with Jalu (our new dinghy name 😉 ) to explore the city. We found the grocerie stores , the market, which was unfortunately not close as nice as in La Rochelle and all the other shops we could possibly need.
A little disappointement was the Real Nautical Club, the local sailing club. In the guide books it was said that they are very helpful to transit sailors, e.g. they would offer their buoys, showers , wifi or just provide helpful information, but in fact we didn’t feel welcomed at all. First it was a struggle to get into the club as everybody very snooty told us it was a private club (must be very important). And when we finally reached the office (and eventually found someone who spoke english) the conversation felt awkward. The person in charge was rather ungracious and almost unwilling to give us any information – so we said very graceful  🙂 “thank you” and left.
Instead we asked a local and very friendly fisherman where we could leave Jalu in the little harbour (as all the exit gates to walk off the platforms were locked and we couldn’t get out) and with our poor spanish, hands and feet conversation, he explained us where we could stay. That was fun and very nice!

My birthday present was to test our water maker for the first time. (Not really, it just happened to be that day 😉 ). We were very excited how it would work. We can proudly confirm it works great! There were no leaks or other issues and the water tasted nice. 🙂 That means we are getting more and more autonomously. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing we can even run the watermaker without using the engine. Yeaaaah.
Coming back to my birthday… while the watermaker was running I made myself a nice big ” Hefezopf” which we enjoyed for a late breakfast. Yammi. My wish for the rest of the day was strawling around the town, inhaling the atmosphere and of course having some delicious pintxos with wine from the area.

The next days we did a lot of relaxing on the boat or sight seeing ashore. We enjoyed the old town with the  ‘Placa de la Constitucion” (that used to be the place where they had the bullfights) walked along the beaches, hiked up the ” Monte Urgull” , strawled to the other side of the city crossing the river to see the surfer beach and “new” town and much more. And inbetween we surly didn’t forget to rest in sweet little cafés or bars to have a café con leche or tapas with a beer.
The second week was not as sweet as the first one. The weather decided to get colder again and the swell was running heavily into the bay which made our daily life more difficult. It was so rocky that every single piece had always to be in its place and we had to walk with wide spreaded legs 🙂 – like real sailors! And riding ashore was always a challenge not to get wet. After a couple of days in that shaky bay we decided it was time to leave. We bought some groceries, did some laundry (far away) and enjoyed a last time the nice scenery of San Sebastián in our favorite café.

April the 8th at 6 o’clock in the morning we headed off to Bilbao.