6051. Pintxos y Rioja

Eight weeks since the last mini tour.

So much has changed, yet everything stays the same.

Now we are two. Our gorgeous fluffball companion of so many trips made her final Channel crossing on 1 July. Polly. We miss you every day.

Plymouth.

Leaving England via Plymouth makes everywhere else seem glamorous. We’re among the first in the queue, yet one of the last vans to board the Amorique. Tedious. Until tomorrow when we’ll be among the first off. We’ll be 30 kms down the road before the last car rolls off the deck.

The early morning descent into the bowels of the ship is a harsh wake up call. We’re all somewhat protected from danger and noise these days. Except on a ferry. The noise of engines, the stench of diesel, the clanging of the huge ramp, the reality of this ramp being the only thing keeping the sea at bay. It’s sensory overload for those recently risen from slumber.

 Roscoff.

With no dog to pee there’s no need to stop at Roscoff. It’s straight out onto familiar roads, heading east to go south. It feels counter intuitive, especially as St Malo appears on the signs, but after Rennes we veer right and know that every short French mile is now a mile in the right direction.

There’s drizzle, there’s rain, there’s moments of dry, but the wipers slosh most of the time. The rain makes the driving hard, but the distance easy. We know we’re passing places of interest we’d like to visit. But not in the rain.

For several years I’ve been reluctant to drive far on a trip, but this time we need to knock out the miles. 

We swop drivers after a couple of hours. Minty takes the wheel as the rain increases and constant spray makes everything more challenging. She hasn’t driven ArchieVan for years and the sudden stress of a 3.5 tonne beast is not to be underestimated. She’s steady, calm, and before too many hours we roll into Fontenay-le-Comte where the barrier to the aire is broken and we have a free night ahead – with electricity.

Fontenay-le-Comte

Haute Cuisine and French Mondays. Much of France is closed on a Monday, especially the restaurants. The two fancy places we’d researched may deign to allow patrons later in the week but on this first Monday in September our choice is reduced to one of several tabacs. 

Smoking is still in vogue in this town, and the smokers are well served. Our joint, Le Terminus, was stocked with every tobacco product, including a temperature controlled cabinet of fine cigars. More important to us were the rather excellent beers, starting at an immodest 5 percenter and climbing quickly.

Food was limited, but blimey it was good. Baked camembert with honey looked an impossible challenge, but we scraped the bowl clean. Saucisson fit for the finest table. Dinner. Done.

Everyone else in the bar was smoking. The pretty young things, the heavy lined hacking old timers, the young mothers, and the young mothers’ mothers. It’s depressing. It’s true. It felt like Belgium.

The town is known for its chateau, known for its tower. We missed the chateau. We missed the tower. But we gazed across the Vendée in the early evening light and admired the pretty roofs. The town feels good. It’s one to come back to.

Blaye.

Swopping a big river for a huge river.

More motorway. More miles. Two and a half hours. Rain. Rain. Rain.

Then Blaye on the massive muddy estuary of the Gironde.

In the town there’s the most impressive of all the impressive Vauban fortresses.

At the Château Marquis de Vauban there’s room for our home in front of the grand house, where we’re invited for a tasting of their most fine Bordeaux wines. There’s a massive 15 per cent red in a heavy bottle with a deep dimple to curry favour with the sommelier’s thumb. It weighs in at a suitably hefty price but it rather took my fancy. There’s a big birthday coming. I may just partake.

A run. What? Yes. A morning run. I’m preparing to hit 60 hard and I have tried to start running. This morning’s took me around the Vauban fortifications and up a disused railway line for 6kms of discomfort. It is getting easier. It is not getting easy.

More motorway. More miles. Four hours. But for the first day there’s no rain. Yet.

The Bordeaux periferique is a shock. Even though I have driven it several times, there’s no getting used to the constant barrage of junctions filled with Lithuanian juggernauts thundering along, easing for no one. Then as fast as it started the city is behind us. The Lithuanian trucks still thunder along, but now they’re orderly, strung out along the long straight road south.

South of France

Once past Bordeaux you’re in the south of France. The deciduous trees give way to the soft feathered pines of the south. The previously flat road (hardly a hill since Plymouth) becomes flatter still, with only a few dunes to lend perspective. And it’s warm. Warm dry air that we’ll quickly miss.

There’s a hundred miles of this hot flat pine scented land before it changes as suddenly as any change on the road so far.

Doomful clouds gather ahead, hiding the looming foothills of the Pyrenees. Clouds break. Rain thunders down. Stops as quickly as it started.

One more peage, and on the other side Spain.

Hondaribba on the Spanish side, Henaye on the French. A river runs through it.

Spain. Yay!

You’ve been driving for hours. You now have to deal with a new country’s road systems. The urban planning is utterly different. For good measure they throw a new language at you. Basque. Claimed to be the oldest of European languages, but incomprehensible to all but the Basque, and probably to many of them too. Here there are areas with no Spanish even. I’m secretly impressed, but that comes after the stress.

Hondarriba.

Jaizkibel (Jezebel to you and me). It’s the name of the mountains behind us. It’s the campsite too. And like the roads that snake higher and higher, the campsite is a bugger to get into. Its van spaces must have been laid out when the VW Transporter was the standard van size, for while each space is accessible, there’s a fair amount of clutch burning involved.

The campsite café bar is lively. Down the hill the town is revving up for a night of excitement. It’s all going on.

60

Right now it’s breakfast time. It’s my birthday. A big birthday. And so we breakfast at the café. Alongside Minty an old boy sidles up to the bar and asks for his coffee to be spiked. Our man glugs a generous measure of eau de vie on top of his espresso. In the corner some fellows crack open a bottle of red to sup with their breakfast sandwiches. At the bar the farmer has another beer before climbing back into his tractor.

In all Western Europe nowhere preserves its identity as strongly as the Basque.

In the young that often involves haircuts that would make an East German’s mullet look tame. If someone looks like their baby brother cut their hair they’re probably Basque.

Fiesta.

Their festivals are special too.

There’s an air of excitement in the town. There are a lot of people out. Youngsters carry snare drums or penny whistles. Every bloke wears an oversized red beret, and the red Basque scarf, but there aren’t many blokes to be seen. Women and girls line the street. That doesn’t do it justice. Thousands of women and girls, dressed in their finest, chatter excitedly in orderly rows on either side of the street, despite persistent drizzle. 

There’s drumming. As it gets closer there’re whistles too. 

A band of perhaps a hundred men in smart berets and uniform shirts amble by. First the whistles, then the snares, backed up by marching drums. 50 penny whistles make a good sound. 

They don’t appear to have a route. The crowd is surprised as the band turns to march through them. Then there’s another band coming from a different street. Their progress is too casual to be called a march, but it’s most definitely marching music.

Within a short time there are five bands, possibly more, all marching their own route. In narrow streets the sound is a thing to behold. 

For tonight at least, the show of masculinity is not the blackness or size of your Mercedes, but the tone of your whistle peeps. It’s refreshing, reassuring.

Fiesta. +1

OK. I wrote that on Wednesday. The festival builds to its crescendo on Sunday. Thursday night is bigger. Much bigger. I count the rows of one band as it marches by. 80 rows. 80 rows of 5. 400 players. It’s probably the smallest band out there tonight. There are thousands of players. The noise tremendous. 

We’re moving on tomorrow. I wonder how Sunday will pan out. It could be huge. I regret a little that we won’t see it.

I haven’t mentioned the fantastic pintxos. The wonderful riojas for pennies. I hope there’ll be more and I’ll talk about them as they happen. 

I haven’t mentioned our long climb up to the hill fort that’s an extreme construction, but with nothing useful online to explain its purpose.

Vitoria. Haircuts and weed.

Vitoria Gasteiz. Cities throw traffic and trams and electric buses, they throw people on silly electric scooters pretending to be motorbikes, and around here there seem to be hundreds of racing cyclists travelling as fast as the cars. The secret to avoiding all this chaos is to arrive in the early afternoon while they’re all asleep.

The Basque capital Vitoria is often considered the best Spanish city to live in, and it’s easy to see why. Radiating out from its almond shaped old town are the most magnificent avenues with 10m wide tiled walking streets where the cars are allocated a single lane on either side. These avenues have rather wonderful villas and the very smartest apartment blocks behind the huge horse chestnuts and planes.

The centre is a heady blend of heritage and alternative statement making. The vast cathedral leads onto Aiztogile where the reek of weed is as relaxing as the cathedral’s frankincense is pious. The bars get more inviting and the regulars with their untethered dogs seem less intimidating as the airborne intoxicants take effect. A couple of pintxos, a coffee too, all so cheap and delicious. 

We’ll not stay, even though it seems a good place. Instead we’ll head on for an hour to Haro, the Riojan capital where every great Spanish wine you’ve heard of seems to be headquartered. 

Haro

There’s wine, yes, and there’s fiesta too.

No pipes and drums tonight. Instead here carnival is more what we’re used to. Bedlam. Floats. And people turning out in their thousands.

Haro Campsite – excellent. And another lively bar. It’s no surprise, these campsites have far greater populations that a decent sized village – and everyone is on holiday.

Eltziego. Bread of heaven.

Just down the road there’s this little village, not much more than a couple of churches, vineries and a smart motorhome park. We wouldn’t have stopped if Minty hadn’t read of its bakery, but a bakery recommendation is not to be ignored. What an experience we were in for.

The bakery was worth any detour. The breads were works of art the like of which I have never seen. The cakes so light and utterly delicious. To the villagers it’s just their bakery. To the rest of the world, it’s a marvel.

Marvel yes, but only the start of the experience. In the village square there’s a gathering of musicians, the church is so rammed full they’ve left the doors open for the word of God to seep out before it’s drowned in wine. A band of youngsters warms up in one corner, the old boys take another. At 1.00 sharp the first firework rocket soars into the sky and it all kicks off. Bands stroll in different directions, women soak the players from upstairs balconies (true, washing up bowls of water are thrown over the crowds), wine is poured from mouth to mouth from skins by pretty young things. 

And the other church? In the silent other church there are works at every turn that could have marked the pinnacle of the artisan’s career. Even the simple wooden floorboards had been polished to create a massive cross running the length of the building.

All this we would have missed. Had it not been for that bakery.

Logroňo.

A decent sized city of c.151k inhabitants, Logroňo wouldn’t have been on our map were it not for the promise of some of the best pintxos (Basque tapas) in Spain. 

We arrived in the heat of the day and all was quiet along the 20 minute riverside (Ebro) walk into town. In fact town seemed quiet too until the noise exploded from the tightly packed square of narrow streets where the best pintxos bars were nearing the late afternoon close. 

Time to hit Bar Soriano for its famous mushroom stack. This is the only food it does, and it has been serving up the same recipe for 45 years. It’s loud. Hot. This place could charge any price and do well, yet it’s incredibly cheap, our two small beers and two pintxos cost just 6 Euros. 

And the pintxos? A small round of bread balancing by three mushrooms, topped by a juicy prawn. Simple. Delicious.

The cathedral was quite a sight too. But closed for now.

We finish the day at St Vincent and the final festival is kicking off as we slope down the hill, exhausted, needing our bed.

And to finish. The very last. And the very first.