Toulouse to Lisbon on a Tandem: Ride Day 8: San Sebastian to Lekeitio

We are looking forward to getting to Bilbao, where we will take our first rest day and explore the city. We are especially looking forward to the Guggenheim museum. But the distance from San Sebastian to Bilbao was longer than we wanted to ride in one day, so we split it into two. Today we ride to a campground on Spain's north coast near Lekeitio.

A day of perfect weather and a ride that can only be described as perfect. What a day! But let’s start with last night in Donastia.

We were excited to try pintxos – Basque for tapas. After wandering around old town, and watching some traditional Basque dancing we picked a spot that looked pretty good (everything opens at about 8 p.m.). It was quite an experience. Ordering and seating or standing is a free for all. You are shoulder to shoulder with everyone else and you shout your order to the bar – the servers hear all and, remarkably, remember who ordered what.

We ordered scallops in some kind of curry, spider fish, steak with hummus and tuna. The food is delivered when it is ready, one dish at a time. (Unlike many pintxos places, the one we visited had food only on order. Many places have the food already prepared and you just grab what you want. Each dish has a skewer in it and you pay by the number of skewers and their length. The food was great, the spider fish and tuna the highlights. But overall the scene was a bit chaotic for my liking. It was deafeningly loud and the hustle and bustle and shoving and yelling was too much.

Pintxos joint

Scallops and spider fish

Typical scene in Pintxos bar

It was well past 10 when we finished dinner we headed to the apartment to sleep. Old town Donastia is super busy and super loud with lots of partying. We kept the windows close and the fan on to add white noise, but still we heard lots of raucous drinking songs being sung until 5 a.m., maybe later. But it was Saturday night on a big holiday weekend so we expected it.

And we had a bit of revenge when we left at 8 a.m. – the entire town was asleep! We had to carry the huge bike down 2 flights of stairs with multiple corners (there was nowhere else to store it) and we bumped walls loudly on many corners. Ha!

We rode along the city’s beaches and then hit the first hill that we knew was coming. It was plenty warm at this hour, but this hill warmed us up right away anyway. It was pretty steep – about 10 km at no less than 11 % with ramps up to 15 %. But we did great. Slow, but great. One cool thing on this Sunday morning was the many hundreds of cyclists out riding. Clubs of over 50 riders, groups of 25, and everything else. Of course they all were going faster than us, but everyone passed us with encouragement. “Aupa, Aupa!!” was the shout (it means “come on let’s go!). Fun.

We saw tons of folks hiking about 10 km to Donastia for a regatta

Our route followed (in part) the Camino -- we passed a lot of "pilgrims" doing the walk to Santiago de Compostela for whatever reasons people do that (yes, you could say the same about riding a bike). We rode for a long time with some Puerto Rican guys from Florida who were doing the bike version. They were fun but we dropped them on a hill. We also road with a guy from Colombia who has kids in the US. We were on a big hill and he slowed down to ride with us and chat -- he said it was a great excuse because his riding partner was too fast. Glad to oblige!

The roundabouts have traditional Basque boats in them

In places the road was busy and we worried about holding up traffic. But we took a page from the Spanish rider’s play book: just ride in the middle of the lane and let the cars figure it out. We watched this with amazement and not once, never, did a car get angry for being slowed. The bikes are truly part of the road environment and are given total respect.

After a coffee on top of the hill and a long, steep descent we hit the next hill. We have no idea what it is named, but it was 1.4 km long with a maximum of 18 %, no less than 12 %. We were really close to stepping off the bike and pushing but we avoided the walk of shame; maybe the shouts of “aupa” spurred us on. Anyway, we made it.

The summit of "Killer Hill" -- well, it almost killed us

The coastline

Basque kids in their Sunday best

From there on we rode along the coast over many rolling headlands. Absolutely gorgeous with aquamarine waves crashing on rocky shores and tiny, charming villages with perfect beaches spaced about every 10 km or so. Eventually we made it to our campground, Camping Endai, just outside of Lekeitio (we’re in the Asturian region now). We set up our portable casa, then rode into Lekeitio (2 km down the road) for some pintxos in a relaxed atmosphere and a glass of wine.