San Sebastien

Hello once again we are slowly getting towards our current location, next up San Sebastien, Spain, a place so good even the King goes there on his holidays

After the poor weather in France and with a passenger in tow we headed down the coast toward Spain and San Sebastien a town renowned for its food, party atomosphere, and as we found out a strong desire to not be a part of Spain anymore but more of that later.

It seems however that the curse of Jonah had struck again as we arrived in San Sebastien to overcast skies that looked like rain, and a biting wing worthy of the Big Market on a saturday night for those of you who have ever been to Newcastle! Skies aside we faced a more immediate problem, finding somewhere to stay and a space to park the cab that did not require an expedition of Stanley-esqe proportions to reach. The problem was compounded by the fact that with a population of just over 400,000 it seems that every single one of these people owns at least one car that is parked on the street. We would later discover there was another reason there was no parking, but until then we faced a challange of biblical proportions to find a space. Doing as the locals did and parking in the middle of the road to try and find a spot to stay we found another problem as there was no accomodation to be had anywhere in the old town. However things began to look up when a lady told us about a place over the other side of the river that had room and would be cheap.

This seemed to good to be true, and of course it was. The nice old lady pictured on the left (possibly, you get the idea anyway!) swiftly turned into a negotiator that would have turned the Dragons Den into whimpering children wanting to charge us a small fortune for a very basic room. Just goes to show no matter how nice they appear or how many Werthers originals they offer you, old people will always try to stitch you up (Iain is of course excluded from this general classification as is my Nan). After a quick sandwich in the street we moved on to the campsite at the top of the hill over the town at Ignelo. After setting up camp, we headed to the on site bar for some tapas and a quiet night in, how wrong we were!

Like a scene from a bad disaster movie we should have seen it coming, we should have seen the signs but we missed them all. As an educational service to all if you see these men; be prepared to imbibe your own body weight in booze. Ron (pictured right) and Jamie (yes the one in the monkey hat, see how we missed the signs!), two Irish athletes in training for Oktoberfest, took us and the night onto a different level. What followed was a steady increase in blood alcohol levels, stories, jokes, our Finnish fare getting completley bamboozled by Irish accents not to mention the humour bouncing back and forth. Needless to say we moved from the bar where you can see we were reasonably sober;



via this

ending up somewhere around here

The next day we awoke to larger than average hangovers, apart from Bendigo (or so he claims!) but were determined to make the most to the sunshine which had finally elected to make an appearence. After a short bus ride we found a sight that we did not expect to see in a sleepy holiday distination, riot police in full gear holding a variety of extremely dangerous looking weapons! As you can see from the picture on the right hand side, old people cannot be trusted as these two were the ringleaders of the whole affair! It seems we had arrived right in the middle of a period of instabilty in Basque politics with the supreme court of Spain ruling two of the areas political parties as illegal. This as you can imagine did not go down well, hence the police presence, but in typical Basque fashion ended with one great big party. This also was partly to blame for the lack of parking and accomodation. After getting in a bit of surfing and seeing the Spanish version of S club 7 featuring what looked like Bertie Basset ( I had heard he had gone downhill but this...) we hit the town for poo's and grins and kalimocho (red wine and coke).

Staying in the old town we hopped from bar to bar. Bendigo threw out an assortment of shapes on the dancefloor, agreed to meet a girl in Bristol the following week to teach her English and anything else he felt she needed to know, Iain went limbo dancing, was asked if he was our dad, and lauching forth into a bizzare rendition of singing in the rain with a broken umbrella,

meanwhile Nathan consumed the kalimocho and lept onto an abandoned stage to pretend to be Bono without any of the style or charity work. Chris on the other hand tried to keep up with the pace of our drinking ( apparently they have not heard of binge drinking in Finland yet!) and searched unsuccesfully for "chicas" with dubious morals.

With the night over Iain entertained the taxi rank with more dancing, Bendigo lay down for a nap and Nathan had to live up to English steroetypes and was caught short in the street.

We did however get sight of our glittering prize some 2000 odd miles away, the desert, hopefully we can still get there for real!

Next up Mundaka and a very long drive to Portugal.

(There will also be a few more videos added to this post as soon as we find a decent connection)