Tuesday, May 29 - to Amintza

After croissants, green gage plum jam and coffee, we said goodbye to Jasper, drove back to Potes and headed north through the Desfiladero de la Hermida, another narrow deep gorge with scarily large buses careening towards us. Partly cloudy.

We stopped at a couple of wetlands on the shore that were recommended for birds, but didn’t see much action. The Picos are still visible from the coast and it was a pretty amazing sight to see 8000’ snow-splotched peaks from sea level.

RRZ suggested I might look in the Lonely Planet guidebook to describe the passing scene and I found Santillana del Mar, a tiny Medieval village that passed strict planning laws back in 1575 and so has managed to preserve its lovely old buildings and cobble stone streets right up to today. As our route passed through it, I thought we ought to see what good planning laws can do and pass the word onto the SB City Council! It is an exquisite town, rather full of tourists and knick-knacks, but lovely just the same. The Cueva de Altamira was nearby and we probably should have seen it as it’s supposed to have fabulous cave drawings, but as we had a long ways to go and as one can only see an excellent copy, not the originals, we drove on.

We arrived in Basque Country, or Euskadi, and immediate noticed strangely worded street signs and hoped we wouldn’t have trouble navigating, particularly through Bilbao, but it was pretty easy and we arrived in Armintza, a tiny fishing village about 25 km north of the city. We found the ten-room Arresi Hotel on a hill overlooking the harbor and checked in. We have a spacious room with wrap-around glass doors on two sides and great views of the ocean and hotel vineyard. The only problem was that the town has three restaurants, none of which are open. Tourism in this area is pretty much confined to weekends which was a surprise as we had been told we could walk to dinner.

One of the family who run the Arresi told us about the Kaian Restaurant about 5 miles away in the town of Plentzia, so we thought we’d make a dry run and see if we could find it as it’s supposed to be a little tricky driving around these towns. We found the town and wandered around, finally asking three men standing on the side of the road. They argued a bit in Basque and finally decided that it was half a block away, which it was, and we could park right there. So we returned to the hotel and cleaned up and set our once again at nine. We turned out to be the only customers that night, but what a night! That meal should be get at least one star! We split an order of cuttlefish with onion sauce and then I had incredible piece of rare grilled duck sitting in a pool of creamed raisins with the local salty Idiazabal cheese grated on top, and Bob had a succulent lamb shank on a vegetable cake. For dessert I had the cheese, somehow whipped up and layered with air-dried quince slices with walnut ice cream on the side. Thanks to our GPS we managed to weave our way home.