Barcelona to Bilbao

It is about 7am on Friday as I start this writing, and my childhood best friend, Jess (who will, I hope, contribute to this post herself, perhaps in another text color), and I are very much in the Basque city of Bilbao, Spain.
For those who question whether one can be very much in a place or not, I can only say that the scale I am measuring our location by is not simply geographically oriented, but psychologically and emotionally, too. I could be more in Bilbao if, say, I spoke the language and had friends living here, but, indeed, the introduction to Bilbao that Jess and I experienced made me feel so thoroughly that we are here and nowhere else that I am confident that I can claim that we are very much in Bilbao.

Actually, our whole trip has been quite the experience already. Our flight out of Atlanta to Barcelona was one of the last (perhaps the very last) to leave before a lightning storm overtook the airport. I got to see one bolt of lightning strike just beyond the airstrip as we parted from the ground, and it looked as though something had caught fire... but the angle of the plane was not to my advantage (being in the middle set of three columns of seats on the plane, my vantage point was not one of the highlights of the trip unless a snoring jock counts). I tried to let Jess sleep as much as possible, bugging her once to ask her to help me with a math problem: if you have only one sleeping person on your right but two only half-asleep/awake people on your right in a row of 4 seats, and you have to get up to go to the bathroom, which way do you go? I was sure there was an optimization opportunity there. Jessie's answer was an exasperated "Rachel...", and since she was one of the half-awake two on my right, I went left. In other words, after including that forgotten variable of an exasperated Jess, the equation was quite easy to figure out.

Our arrival in Barcelona was a collection of many, "Oops, I forgot..."s. Jessie kindly wrote this section of her journal as "we forgot"- but only about one half of the "we" was in charge of bringing the GPS, maps, and other driving materials. And I forgot. Hence, along the way, we purchased street maps of the country and the city we were headed to ~ Bilbao. There are a few things that should never be left off a street map sold in a highway gas station (i.e., directed toward drivers). Indications that streets are one-way, for example, should never, ever be omitted from a map of a city with as many ambiguously marked streets and inconsiderate motorcycles as Bilbao. Don't worry ~ I did not drive the wrong way down a one-way street. I did, however, have to repeatedly inform Jessie that her otherwise fantastic route to our destination was spoiled again by a one-way street directed in obstinate opposition to our plans. Oh, did I mention this was my first time driving a stickshift as well? Except for the half hour lesson Mom gave me before I left, that is. (Sales pitch for the Chevy Cobalt I drove in the States: it is a manual transmission car that makes you wonder if there is really much of a difference between driving stick and automatic. Anti-pitch for the Nissan Micra I drove from Barcelona: it soothed me in to a false sense of confidence on the highway, then it stripped me of my humanity in the city and convinced me as well as all drivers around me that I was a monkey of middling talent attempting to overthrow Bilbao one street at a time.)

The worst part was, Jessie did quite expertly get us to exactly where we wanted to be in just one carefully crafted and well-directed attempt. And then we drove by it. Jessie saw it, and I immediately started looking for parking. Funny thing, though -- there ain't much parking in an interminable tunnel, which was the next section of road we hit after determining to find said parking. We gain altitude in the tunnel, turned and turned and turned, and were released onto an unnamed road in an unspecified direction. Fudgapoodle (shout out to Sarah B., who helped me clean up my language just in time for this trip). I don't think either of us knows how long we drove after that, how many roads we circled on, how many times we swore never to drive in a Spanish city again, before we arrived back at our hostel. And just as we did, a car pulled out of a parking spot in a side alley right next to our hostel.

This alley deserves description. It dead-ends about 4 car-lengths from the street, and it situated on a hill. Usually, a driver new to manual transmission driving abhors hills, but this one was perfect. I drove up past the parking place, and then just slid down backward into my space. Perrrfecto. (Ok, ok... there was a small hitch in my first fall backward, so I had to pop forward and try a second time, with impressive success.)

Once we started walking, we loved the tiny portion of the city we saw and look forward to seeing more. I cannot wait to get started today. We have the rest of the day in Bilbao, then leave in the morning for Pamplona. We have decided that leaving the city is not as scary as driving into it, and Pamplona may be kinder since it is smaller (Brandon, don't you dare tell us anything to the contrary). However, we may cancel our second car reservation and take buses and trains for the rest of the trip. As the only driver, I will find it more restful, I hope, to take public transportation. As the only active worrier, Jessie will, too. I do hope I enjoy the trains and train stations. I heard just enough bad about them to have thought that learning to drive stickshift in a country of crazy drivers and little to no English on the roadways was a better idea. I am still ambivalent on this point.

I'll let Jess edit what I have written as well as fill you all in on details of trash can hitting and garage driving, having to speak all the Spanish for the two of us in a proudly Euskara-speaking region, how cool our hostel is, and the many other bits I have left out. She has the pics from the drive, too. Oh, the wind farms were soooo beautiful! And the mountain scenery in this part of the country made us claim that 50 euros in tolls was worth the price -- thank goodness for our extraordinary ability to resolve cognitive dissonance!