On the Road in Northern Spain

My second week in Spain I rented a little green Fiat Cubo and took off to see the countryside.
From Barcelona I headed up the Costa Brava or Wild Coast.I spent the night in Figueres and visited the Salavator Dali theatre, museum, and crypt. That man was seriously strange. The next day I headed into the Pyrenees. In Catalonia the mountains were fairly low altitude and covered with oak and beech forests. The oak trees still held their dead leaves from last fall and the beech trees had red buds but no leaves yet. It looked more like autumn than spring.
I spent the night in a village in the Cerdanya valley.I was the only person in the hotel.The man who ran it spoke Catalan, and while he understood Spanish, he only spoke it grudgingly and he knew no English. The restaurant in the hotel had wonderful food, but it was full of old local men who all stopped talking and stared at me when I walked in, and continued to stare while I ordered and ate. I tried to maintain dignity, but it was not very comfortable. Traveling alone in the off season has its drawbacks. Here's a picture of the hotel:
The next day the sun was shining. This was the weather pattern for most of my road trip - one day of rain and clouds followed by sunshine followed by a day of clouds and rain and so on. The mountains grew higher and wilder as I traveled into Aragon. There was still plenty of snow in the highest passes.I was highly amused to see a police car carrying skis.Beautiful little towns were perched on small knolls and in scenic valleys.I drove way out of my way to see a little town that is a mecca for backcountry skiing. This was the artwork on the street in the middle of the main square of town. Note the free heels, climbing lifters, and backpack:Unfortunately, the ski season was over and the town was deserted.All eateries were closed and it was nearing the end of lunch time. Lunch is the main meal of the day in Spain, and if you miss it you might not find anything open until dinner at 9 or 10 at night. I asked an old woman who was sitting on a bench where I might find a bite to eat and I must have looked pretty sad because she grabbed me by the elbow and took me home and made me a delicious lunch of wild game and white beans, chattering all the while in rapid Spanish with a very strange accent which I could barely make out a word of. She was very kind and I really appreciated her charity. I didn't have my camera with me when I went to lunch, so I didn't get her picture, but I don't think I'll forget her. Apparently the town is un-shuttered again in the summer for the climbing season.Then it was on through the rest of the mountains and into Navarra.I drove past Pamplona (a town too big for this trip) and on to the Pais Vasco, or Basque Country.Now the signs were no longer in Spanish or Catalan (which is at least a Romance language, closely related to two languages I know a bit: French and Spanish), but in Euskari, the mysterious Basque language. The names of towns were usually in both Euskari and Spanish on the road signs (the two languages having completely different names for every town that usually didn't even sound similar), but wherever possible, Basque independistas had spray-painted over the Spanish. Mind you, the road map I had was only in Spanish. So for two days on the Basque coast I was more or less lost the whole time. Fortunately, people were extremely friendly and helpful, and everyone spoke Spanish clearly enough for me to sort of understand. I treated being lost as an opportunity to talk to the locals and discover opportunities for adventure. Again, I skipped the cities (San Sebatian and Bilbao) and just drove along the coast, pausing at scenic overlooksI stayed at the smallest, steepest town I could find, called Elantxobe.Again I had dinner in a bar full of old men from the village, but this time, after an initial moment of staring at me, they went back to shouting at each other and singing in Euskari, while I ate the delicious spicy fish stew and drank hard cider. After dinner, I gave myself a tour of the harbor full of small fishing boats.The next day I got lost again a few times, and stumbled onto a castleAnd a mysterious, painted forest (which is actually an art installation by a Basque artist)I finally found my way to Gernika, the traditional seat of the leaders of the Basque people, made famous by being the location of the first saturation bombing attack against a purely civilian target - carried out by the Nazis in support of Franco's campaign to suppress the Basques in the midst of the Spanish civil war just before WWII. Pablo Picasso's most famous painting, called Guernica, was a memorial and protest against the horror of this attack, which completely flattened the town and killed most of the inhabitants (those not killed in the bombing were machine-gunned from fighter planes as they ran for shelter). There is a tile reproduction of the painting on a city street in Gernika (the painting itself is in a museum in Madrid).Gernika has been rebuilt, and is now the site of a beautiful, moving Peace Museum, which combines graphic images of the horrors of war and the attack on the town with wide-ranging ideas about peace and how to achieve it in the modern world. The movie about reconciliation rather than retaliation made tears come to my eyes (they showed it in English for me). The town is rather plain, being all post-war construction. The only old building is the church, which was partly destroyed and still shows the charring and different colored bricks from the rebuilding.From there it was on to Cantabrias where I got more thoroughly lost than ever before even though the signs were in Spanish again. But I ended up finding my way to the charming old city of Santillana del Mar where I stayed in a lovely little hotel in an old mansion.In the morning I poked around town before anyone else was about I visited the Altamira cave with astoundingly beautiful prehistoric paintingsthen headed inland. Going across the mountain passes of Cantabrias I saw ridge after ridge lined with wind turbines. I kept thinking of poor Don Quixote and how he'd have a stroke if he saw came through here today (you can click on the picture to enlarge it to see the windmills).
Out of the mountains and onto the plains (where, by the way, it was NOT raining no matter what the song says) and into the wine region of La Rioja.
In the wine country I stayed in a walled medieval city called Laguardia. My hotel had an underground passage to a tavern/wine bar on the next street. From the passage, there was access to their wine cellars (wineries and wine cellars in Spain are called bodegas). I was given a tour of the bodega, complete with wine tasting. The wine is stored in tunnels under the city that were originally for military purposes, since this town is on large hill and guarded the whole valley (hence the name Laguardia)I spent the afternoon in the tavern drinking wine, eating tapas and having a lively discussion of politics mostly in Spanish, but partly in English, with the friendly, fun Basque bartender. Then I had a fabulous four course dinner with lots of wine. They take wine pretty seriously there. The next day I slept very, very late then took off again and drove straight back to Barcelona to return the rental car.

All in all, the road trip was a memorable adventure and I felt like I knew a little more about Spain than I would have if I'd stayed in the cities and tourist sites.