Spring 2025 week 2: “Stuck” in northern Spain

Okay, it’s Friday 21 March as I write this and the end of our second week on the road. We’re almost in Portugal (our destination). It was still raining all over southern Europe this week, so we got “stuck” in Northern Spain. 
      An obvious destination from La Rochelle (west coast of France) was Bordeaux. Despite my ex being a wine expert, I don’t recall having visited the city, which is really big and beautiful with tons of shops, neighborhoods, and terraces. Bordeaux is also an inland port (didn’t know that!).

After Jacques getting a new hat in Bordeaux, we headed to our intermediate destination, St. Jean Pied de Port. Last time, we travelled from there along the foot of the Pyrenees to Southern France. This time, the unending rain drove us across the Pyrenees to Pamplona, Spain.

Crossing the Pyrenees was fantastic (highest point 1000+ meters) and nothing like the terrifying Picos de Europa because there were guardrails! This gave us a — probably false — sense of security.
     Expecting Pamplona to be a tourist trap, located as it is on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, it proved to be the highlight of the second leg of our trip! What a colorful, cozy place (when the bulls aren’t running through the streets). 

 
Still stuck more or less in Northern Spain, we headed to Vitoria — the capital of the Basque region of the country. Having noticed that all the signs are posted first in an unrecognizable language and then in Spanish, I did a little “research.” Gasteiz is the Basque name for Vitoria, which won the UN global green city award in  2019. Bet you didn’t know that! Unfortunately, there was little green to see so early in the season. More interesting is that the Basque language is a so-called “isolate,” meaning nobody knows where the language comes from! It looks  part Baltic or Balkan to me and not at all like Spanish.

Heading now more southwest, things got less green… and a bit surreal (see map). I mentioned to Jacques that I didn’t have fond memories of middle Spain from when I travelled it by train in the middle of  July at age 21 — only dried up land with tundra blowing across it. Things seem to have changed with lots of sprinkler systems and lots of green now visible (it’s also been raining uncharacteristically).

  
We were further surprised to see how high we were the whole time we drove through the middle of Spain — 800 to 1000+ meters. Turns out that we were driving on the Meseta Central: a highland plateau bordered and dissected by mountain ranges. This all made the desert barreness quite bearable! In the words of my travel partner: “I’ve never seen a landscape quite like this.” And getting “stuck” in Spain was not bad at all. 😊