I made breakfast, eggs and ham on toast this morning, and Rosie got out of the shower and put on her bathing suit right as it started to rain.
So instead of straight to the beach, hot drinks sounded good, so we started back at our cafe from yesterday. I had some "menta" (mint) tea and Rosie had her typical café (espresso) con leche (with milk). The cafe gave out little chocolate wafers with each drink, so that alone was worth getting one (or just stealing some extra, like I might have done yesterday...)
We took our hot drinks on a stroll toward lunch. The Conneticut couple we met Marqués de Riscal had given us a restaurant recommendation for lunch. I knew (or thought I knew) what street it was on based on my google search. We walked the length of 31 Agosto Calle, couldn't find it, asked a shopkeeper, and found closed doors. Not open Mondays. We looked to Rick for a recommendation - with the footnote being "not open Mondays." So then it was as easy as "this one has people in it - lunchtime!"
We sat at a table in the back, so ordered real food off a real menu. No tapas here! Our appetizer was peppers stuffed with crab (I really need to get a hold of these canned peppers - you can eat them with anything!) and then we had the three tastes of cod for our entree.
I was interested in trying "pil-pil", a sauce made from the skin of salted cod. I'm so glad the waitress steered us toward the sampler, since the pil-pil was this buttery, fake, sweetly plastic taste that was pretty awful. The waitress clearly likes it, because she was surprised when we preferred the brown and white sauces to the whitish pil-pil sauce. The cod was also just a bit rubbery as well.
However, we were finished with lunch, so had our next adventure/recommendation - kayaking. We went to the tourist information center to ask about it and other suggestions, and then made our way to the shop under the boardwalk.
Neither of us were completely prepared for kayaking, but I was especially unprepared. I wasn't wearing mg swimsuit, but decided today's skivvies were good enough. I walked out from changing with my shirt on, and the guy kindly offered us rash guards (surf shirts) to wear under our life jackets.
We dragged our double kayak out to the surf, then waded in. We let the kayak get parallel to the waves, and it flipped before we climbed in. The waves were crashing around us and over the boat, so we waited for a bit of calm to jump in and start frantically paddling.
It took us a good while to get the kayak away from the breakers and headed toward Santa Clara island.
San Sebastián has an interesting shape. There's a peninsula, which is where Monte Urgill is topped with a Jesus statue (more about that later). Dividing this peninsula from the "surfer beach" and the area of Gros is the river Urumea. The peninsula shelters a beach in a bay, and in the center of this bay is Santa Clara Island.
We paddled out; I splashed myself with seawater so much I hardly noticed when it started spritzing on us. We reached the small beach on the island and began to climb uphill in our bare feet.
We saw one couple during our complete tour of the island. Maybe it was siesta, maybe it was the rain, but it was almost lonely walking past unused picnic tables and some building at the top of the island. My feet clearly have been in shoes too much as we gingerly stepped on rocks to get to the great overlooks.
I started to get a bit concerned as the rain dropped a little harder, but our rash guards and life vests were insulating enough that our half hour poking around wasn't chilly. There were some birds on the island - a juvenile seagull and a chittering mini-bird among the interesting ones.
We circled the island to try to get back to our beached kayak, but ended up just walking a ring around the top before taking the same stone steps down the steep hill.
We paddled in, and as we got closer and closer to shore, Rosie got more nervous about riding the breakers in to the beach. I figured we'd either hit it right and be washed up on the beach, or hit it wrong and be swimming anyway, so why jump out and swim?
We hit it right! We surfed in with a wave, then were swept sideways and still managed to not flip! Our attempt to jump out and swim the kayak out to do it again failed with the kayak being swept back by a wave without us in it, but we still have that one grand show.
We washed off the kayak, then ourselves. Neither of us had towels, so I sacrificed one of my layers to dry myself off. Given that I had been swimming and fully dunked in my underwear and didn't want to get my one pair of jeans wet from the inside out... Well, you can fill in how I got back to the apartment without being naked (on the outside, at least).
We switched into different clothes to hike up Monte Urgill, the hill with the Jesus statue on the east side of the bay. We took a bottle of the fondo (since we bought six of those) and the dark chocolate we bought at the fair yesterday. We couldn't find a corkscrew on the first look through the kitchen, so I attempted to use a screw and pliers (since we found some of those). The pliers ripped the screw out of the cork, sadly (I really wanted to be MacGuyver in this situation), but Nat's daughter peeked out of her room and she pointed us to a hidden drawer, which held a corkscrew.
We were hungry yet again, and found a bar near the bottom of the hill in Old Town that had an appetizing display of tapas. I had a seafood salad in a pepper on bread, a little pastry with beef and peppers in it, and a smoked salmon seafood salad on bread, while Rosie had a bacon-eggplant topping on bread and Brie with jam and ham and walnuts on bread. (Almost all pintxos are on bread. I don't mind a bit.)
Our hike up the hill was still cloudy and grey, but had some great vistas. We found a bench nearly at the top and sat and ate and read and drank. Funnily enough, the guy that we had asked for tapas suggestions (the one that knew English in the bar with anchovies) was walking by with his friends! What a small little city.
It was perfectly timed - we had two glasses (or plastic cups, since that was a really what we were drinking out of) of wine left when it started sprinkling, then raining. We hid under a tree and in the doorway of some stone wall until it passed, then decided to actually get to the top of the hill to get closer to Jesus.
We found the museum, cups still in hand, and peeked in to see if we could walk in. There was a sign that clearly said no food or drink (using symbols, which is why I say clearly), so I walked outside again. However, the nice receptionist just asked if we wanted to get to the top and gestured us through the museum.
I would appreciate museums more if I could always have a glass of wine while walking through them.
We made it the two floors up to the balcony, and it was an even better view. A giant statue of Jesus looming over only made it better of course.
Another museum employee came over to us and asked what was in our cups - coffee? wine? We fessed up that it was wine and he told us no alcoholic beverages. So we had our final few sips and put the cups away to enjoy our slight tipsiness and the captivating views.
The museum was closing in a few minutes, so we headed down the stairs. On our way out, we asked the supervisor man about a bathroom. He told us it was closed. When we got the reception and asked again, so told us it was around and outside. It is clear who our favorite employee of this museum was.
Well, "out and around" weren't quite clear enough directions, so we ended up outside the museum gates without finding a bathroom - I guess you win, evil museum employee. Let's also just say "out and around" is where we ended up peeing anyway.
It was a lovely walk down - no more rain, there were people out and about, and the sun was setting over the Atlantic. While it wasn't the beach days we wanted, it was still lovely beach days.
We grabbed some pintxos on our way back to the apartment, after we figured out we'd have to be up and leaving the apartment at 6:45am tomorrow morning. Some of our typical favorites were closed, but we stopped at a new one by the harbor that had "patatas bravas" and "calamari bravas" - I'm guessing "bravas" means smothered with a delicious cream sauce and decorated with a yummy spicy sauce. I cleaned the plate with bread with that one (like I normally do, actually - they give it to you and charge you for it for a reason!) Then it was a shrimp kebob - gotta have one that was our tried and true staple.
Instead of ice cream, we wandered home with a bit of frozen yogurt. Mine was a strawberry and natural yogurt mix with a kinda gross aftertaste, but I got to try these flat M&M candies that were delicious and reminded me of my mom (Hi Mom!)
The surfer beach was empty except for a group with a metal detector, and we still had packing to do. Nine bottles of wine don't just disappear into carry-on bags without a bit of effort. We'll keep trying to lighten our load before heading back to the US, don't you worry.
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