ferry time
Our ferry journey was 36 hours, board at midnight, disembark at 8am on Sunday morning in Bilbao, all told a pretty dreamy piece of scheduling. We had booked two cabins as dogs over 10kg were limited to one a room. From uber cramped car, where Ali could not place her feet in the footwell due to bags a sundry, to two four berth cabins, it felt good. And nothing to do for the next 36 hrs but hang out, and chill out. The doggie cabins were clustered in one corridor with access to a deck area for walks and bio breaks. A couple of water hoses on deck to wash away the poo remnants and the whiskey stylings of urine on green metallic deck. It was a rugby international weekend so I watched rugby and drank wine. There were the sub-groups, the tribes, that you don’t anticipate seeing but when you do, you go, ‘but of course’. Drunk truck drivers, truculent bikers in denim, leather and patches, a group of Spanish who might have been off duty crew – they showed me how to recoil the deck cleansing hose after use -, a couple of English old farts, one skinny and dressed like a 70ties prog rock band, the other like Danial Day Lewis in My Perfect Laundrette, blond tints, a ridiculous horizontal fringe, and a very specific sort of baggy denims. Actually, the last two were new for me, didn’t see that type in Asia. These were a very English kind of European, gentlefolk who followed their free spirit out of the UK to sunny France or wherever back in the day, and are now older and a little trapped by life stories without chapters. Just two days ago, 3 weeks after the ferry, we were in Pezenas, a town in the region of Occitanie, the department of Hérault, the arrondissement of Béziers, where we decided to get some food from the boulangerie, and where at the cafe next door, sitting outside, I saw a similar looking English man, again skinny, again dressed after a fashion which indicated stylish influence from music genres, and looking overall a little faded, another life waning under the unchanging Mediterranean sun. This gentleman then decided to join the lineup for service at the boulangerie, promptly cutting in front of a young French couple ahead of me, pissing them off to the extent that they spent the next minute or two insulting this Brit behind his back. He ordered fluently enough in French for which I give him some kudos. His behaviour matched his appearance, ennui with self paves the way for disgruntlement with the world, and predictably arrives at shitty behaviour. I expect to see more of these types.
We arrived in Bilbao on a cloudy February morning on the nose at 8am as scheduled. This was to be my debut driving a RHD vehicle on the right side of the road. We were lucky it was a Sunday morning out of tourist season. We drove out of the port area, with its parking lot with lanes layout, the way ferry ports often seem to be, and found ourselves on a four lane motorway into the city. As we climbed away from the sea, on our right side, the landward side, we drove under imposing walls of cliff rock, something that unnerves me, a son of flat green south east Ireland terrain, as I fear where this dramatic landscape might lead, to higher, more precarious altitudes. But as is mostly the case, this Spanish road lead us rather gently towards the city, through a tunnel or two, speed limit of 80km/h and finally to an exit that dropped us into the city a couple of kms, according to the satnav, from our destination, the Guggenheim museum. As luck would have it, we found what turned out to be a precious parking spot along what felt like a prestigious city centre park walking distance from the museum. It was still before 9am and the park had a sprinkling of dog walkers, some locals, some no doubt coming from further afield for that special weekend walk in the city centre. The locals there, as here, were friendly, it seems a general truth that a couple in possession of hounds will have friendly encounters with other dog owners and dog lovers. We walked up to the museum seeing tourists and football fans wearing striped jerseys of red and white, due to, as we were to find out later, a game for that afternoon in the local stadium for the local team, Athletico Bilbao. The tickets to the museum were not cheap not expensive, somewhere in the 15 euro range, and well worth it. We had left the dogs in the car, locked in with windows ajar. Giuseppe invariably moves from the rear seat into the front passenger seat when we leave them in the car alone, and when the car is locked this triggers the car alarm, with the flashing lights and irritating alarm noises that you’d expect, so I have developed the technique of moving far enough away from the car to trigger G’s frontwards move and not so far that I can’t turn off the alarm. G triggered the alarm twice as we left towards the museum, and while in the museum for the next couple of hours, we worried that he might have triggered it again with who knows what consequences – at the very least some unhappy Basque people whose gentle Sunday morning rituals were disrupted by an absentee Irish person’s car alarm and at worst some palaver involving police. The museum content’s were up to snuff, modernism that worked. And when we walked out and as we got closer to the car, close enough to hear any car alarm, there was none. As usually happens the worst case scenarios are just that.
We had some pizza sitting outside and back to the car to set off for our hotel. Luckily, our Garmin satnav, with European maps, seems to work much better on mainland Europe that it did in Ireland, where it was pretty hopeless at finding street addresses. Having a functioning satnav meant we did not need to use our precious mobile data to find our way from A to B. Our satnav is slow witted and needs time to locate satellites, and there we were sitting in our car, waiting for our satnav to fire, while behind us a car waited patiently to claim our parking spot. This car was blocking the road, so I felt I was blocking the road, so I was anxious for the satnav to find satellites and give us directions which happened after an uncomfortable moment or two, and onwards we ploughed deeper into the great adventure. It took us a few times around the block to gain access to our city centre hotel due to road construction. I parked on the side of the street and went in, leaving Ali and the hounds in the car. The girl at reception almost laughed in my face when I asked about parking, did I not know that there was a football game taking place in the stadium 5 minutes down the road, 40,000 fans. She recommended we look for street parking, which we knew from our earlier endeavours was free on Sundays until 9am Monday morning. Surprisingly to us, we found parking within 500m of the hotel. I checked in. There was a €25 surcharge for each of the hounds, something which I had not seen on the booking.**m site; in fact, I had ruled out another hotel because it mentioned a surcharge. When I raised this discrepancy with the woman behind the counter, she dismissed it as incorrect, there was indeed reference to the surcharges on the website. This lady, I knew from our previous interactions, did not suffer foods, I stood down, figuring she would probably be born out right and paid the surcharge, which on top of the €60 or so room fee brought the total cost to a still reasonable €110…not too shabby for city centre hotel room.
That evening we walked out in darkness looking for some food. We were near the main station and the area had that vibe, some Chinese ran small grocery stores, some international food joints whose purpose changes as the day does, from quick coffee and breakfast in the morning, to lunch spot, to evening drinks and light meal place on the way back from work or event. These places tend to be mediocre for both taste and price, a little too expensive and a little bit crappy in terms of quality. It was a nice looking spot, subdued lighting, wooden interior with comfortable seating, a reasonable Sunday evening crowd, we stood outside with our dogs wondering if they would be ok, our frame of reference being Ireland where it would almost definitely not have been ok. The dogs were fine, the server was friendly, the food was mediocre and the price was a little high for where we were and what we had, just as it should be. The next morning we rushed to get to the car before the 9am start of metering and the need to use the somewhat complicated parking machines, which seemed to operate on the basis of parking for set amounts of time, you buy morning parking or afternoon parking – not sure what you do when you want all day parking.