Bob:

The morning sky was a solid gray overcast with low-level haze and occasional light drizzle. We ate breakfast in our room and walked over to the Post Office to mail off the post cards which had addresses that we were fairly certain about, but the weather obstinately remained overcast. With the obscured visibility it did not make sense to drive around and "see the sights", so we decided to visit a museum instead. Frommer's gave a good review of the Chillida sculpture museum in Hernani, which was only 11 kilometers down the (toll) road, so that's where we headed for the morning.

The Chillida Sculpture Museum had two major sections: a park with walking trails where the larger sculptures were displayed and what looked like a converted barn where the smaller and more fragile pieces were displayed. I was allowed to take all the pictures I wanted in both display areas, but the nice thing about the outdoor display area was that people are allowed to touch the sculptures (although not climb on them). The outdoor sculptures were massive, modern pieces made from heavy slabs of steel or blocks of stone, and I did enjoy feeling the surface texture of each piece.

Modern art is not usually, as Wanderung readers know, one of my favorite things, but I liked these sculptures because they seemed to have a sense of humor. Some of the big outdoor sculptures just invited you to stand inside them and peer out. Others had a carved-out part that looked for all the world like some kind of massive chair and I just had to sit in them. I could see why they prohibited climbing on the sculptures because there were a couple of pieces where the climbing option would have been tempting had it been allowed.

We couldn't read the plaques, of course, since they were all in the Basque language and that is a really foreign tongue totally unrelated to Spanish or any western European language. But I still sometimes got the feeling that I had an inkling of what the piece of sculpture was supposed to represent. One piece, for example, looked both to Monika and me like the head of an elephant complete with trunk and ears. Another piece was a huge steel box with a chute coming down into the upper corner, and that looked very much like a garbage dumpster. Now why someone would want to commemorate a garbage dumpster in a sculpture is still a mystery to me, but this is after all modern art so I guess anything goes.

Monika:

Bob:

Since we had both liked a lot of the pieces, we stopped off in the small gift shop on our way out, which gained us a very nice mug, bookmark, and refrigerator magnets. but also set us back about 30 Euro. Although there are restaurants, cafes, and bars for eating pretty much everywhere in Spain, there was only a couple of lonely vending machines at the exit to the museum and we were hungry for a real meal. The weather was still yucky, so we drove back to Zarautz where we knew some of the restaurants offered either an English menu or alternatively pictures of the meals that would help us order. In the end we decided on a kabob place just down the block from our pension, and our meal was very filling and a complete change from our normal fare of sandwiches.

Returning to the pension, I worked on the journal while Monika retrieved things from the car, and then we spent the afternoon updating our journals, communicating via email, reading and, in my case, napping. The curious thing is that the spread of internet service made it much easier to keep in touch with the folks back home while we are traveling, which is really very nice. Out of five hotels in our first week of travel, two offered free WiFi, two offered free Internet via an Ethernet type of cable (which I had providentially brought along), and one only offered a pay Internet service at the rate of 1 Euro per 15 minutes. The town of Zarautz even offered free WiFi for everyone in the beach area; I saw one guy there with his laptop popped open and he was apparently getting a decent connection.

Around 6 p.m. the clouds started to thin out and the sun shined through a bit, so we went out for an evening perambulation. First we wandered over to the train station and there we found that the cities in this coastal region are connected by an electric rail network just like the towns in the Barcelona area. Prices for transport between the cities were quite reasonable and cheap rail transport would definitely beat driving in my book. We also checked out that the ticket machines had an option for giving instructions in English that actually make sense. If we ever come back without a car, we would definitely use the rail network to move about.

Walking back across Zarautz we decided to take the walkway that lead off to the west from the beach area. That turned out to be quite a walk because after rounding the rocky promontory we saw that the walkway was built alongside the highway up to the next town. Since the road and walkway were being reconstructed the day we were there, we didn't try to walk all the way to the next town but I would estimate it as a 5 kilometer walk. Doubling back, we really enjoyed the grand vista of the Atlantic and waves crashing against the rocks below us as we walked back to our pension. Unfortunately, it wasn't until we got back that we thought about the fact that we didn't have anything for the next day's breakfast, so we dragged ourselves back into town, found a grocery store, and bought some bread, juice, fresh strawberries, and peach yogurt for breakfast. After lugging that back to our room, we were exhausted and just flopped into bed for a good night's sleep.

Monika: