San Sebastian and the big breakdown!

[RO] pentru versiunea in romana, apasati aici.

[EN] We did plan to get to San Sebastian. But definitely not this way! Before I get into the beautiful description of this city, let me tell you about how we got there! We were on the top of the mountain Jaikzibel quite close to San Sebastian. In fact, we could see it from there and it looked gorgeous.

We were enjoying the view to learn very soon that the motorhome would not start (the immobilizer was not working), the weather turned quite quickly quite moody: cold, raining with hailstones.

Naturally, we didn’t get so much sunshine anymore so our solar panel was a bit tricky to charge. And wait for it, our phone reception was so rubbish that it took a lot of calls to the recovery service to make sense of what’s happening. And then they couldn’t find us. That was an “exciting” news as you can imagine. Mark had to go outside in that weather to try and get better reception and explain to them again where we are. He came back and we just wrapped up and started drinking wine as there was nothing else we could do for the time being.

Until we saw the recovery van. And the guy said there are some trees and he couldn’t put the motorhome on top through that bit. So he lifted the motorhome to turn it around. Put it back down and tailed it until he got passed the trees. And put it back up to take us to San Sebastian (well actually a bit outside). We were using Google translate quite a bit by the way to understand in the end that there is no available garage at the moment so they will have to put it in a depot.

The insurance said they will organize a taxi for us to take us to the hotel and after more than one hour waiting in the cold because of some misunderstanding, we have arrived at the hotel. We were tired and stressed, but it felt so good to go and eat tasty food and see those beautiful streets with the attractive bars. We soon forgot about what happened that day.

Can I just say, this post is not about complaining. On the contrary, what I want to underline is that we were only cold for a bit and I could honestly not want to imagine what do homeless people go through when it’s so cold … No wonder some spend their little money on alcohol, this physically warms you up! It also taught us that even if we have a bit of wobbly time, it will get much better soon and we should be grateful for everything we have and the help of other people. Going back to San Sebastian. We spent a week in there.

Imagine that this is the place with the most Michelin stars restaurants per head in e world. We thought that going to Michelin stars restaurants would be a bit decadent and a bit (a lot) over our budget (which we are monitoring strictly), so on the first full day of being there, we went a bit crazy with the bars.

I mean, you can start drinking and eating around 11am.

So we just went in the morning and kept going from bar to bar, eating and drinking.

They have an amazing selection of pintxos ready at the bar and you just choose and pay by the piece. Apparently the locals only order hot pintxos and wait for them to be cooked and they laugh that the ready made ones are only for tourists. The one that I liked the most is Gandarias. Note that in November there seemed to be a lot of places (that had really good reviews online) that were shut for renovation. But there were still quite a lot of decent choices left.

The day after, we realized we should take it more easy, so we had coffee in the morning instead of wine or txacoli (the local semi-sparkling white wine). Mark also found a really nice restaurant that has a meal deal surprisingly cheap. For a very tasty 3 course meal with a glass of wine we paid only €11.30 each. The place is called Chinchin. We enjoyed the walks along the sea, admiring the powerful waves, seeing people enjoying surfing and dogs running happily around. We also admired the sophisticated building that used to be a casino and was taken over by the town hall.

The day after, Mark had the idea for us to go to Getaria. So we took the bus there. Balenciaga was born and lived there and there is a museum with some of his creations (which I didn’t visit). There were a lot of fishing boats, and nice little restaurants that cook the most fresh and delicious barbecued fish. We enjoyed a very hearty meal for €18.50 each with a bottle of wine included.

The last evenjng of being there, Mark found a very little bar (La cuchara de San Telmo) that got full so quickly and it had such tasty food, we had the best octopus in there, it was just the type of place that is not fussy at all, where you could eat real local simple, but extremely well flavoured food. I also tried for the first time razor shell clams.

In a nutshell, San Sebastian is a perfect gastronomical (and fashion) destination.But after a week of being there in a hotel and only going out to eat, it was getting expensive and I also missed Mark’s dishes and the option to cook at home so we decided to go to an Airbnb in France where it is cheaper and back in the nature. And especially that it turns out our motorhome was damaged while being transported to the garage. So we are waiting for it to be fixed.

Meanwhile, enjoying the mountains and the comfort of a house. But we can’t wait for the motorhome to be fixed so that we can keep going.

(Note on 30.11.20, it took a month for the motorhome to be fixed, because during transportation from depot to the garage, the motorhome was somehow damaged on the side and nobody would take the blame for it, we said we just need the motorhome back, but it still took a long time, seems like things happen a bit slower in Spain, but it was OK, we had a nice time anyway and just in time to spend Christmas in the motorhome 🙂