I am out of notes so this is for memory. Very dangerous. My last post was for Friday I believe when I climbed the mountain near Panes.

On Saturday it was my intent to move on skipping my endeavour to get to Potes. However, there are only two buses out og Panes on Saturday and I missed the first one because I needed sleep I guess. The second one was around 5:00 so I had a lot of time to put in with no energy to do anything. City Hall was closed so I had no access to internet either. Although my legs were still complaining I walked from one end of town to the other a couple of times, got some grub and had a nap on a park bench. The concierge (owner) of the hotel had stashed my backpack somewhere so I didn´t have it to tote around. He was always there but with ten minutes to bus time he was nowhere to be seen. I explained my dilemma to the bartender (who I had come to know pretty well) and he saved the day finding the backpack in some closet and the bus stopped at the front door.

My trip just went to San vicente de la Barquera because I wanted to get bunked down reasonably early. Although it is right on the water (when the tide is in), there is a multiple span bridge , a lot of hotels and restaurants, I instantly disliked it. I went to a one star hotel close to the bus station thinking that it might be at the low end of the price scale but it wasn´t. I was too tired to go looking elsewhere so settled in to the smallest crappiest room so far. After wandering around later I did come across cheaper accomodation but there was nothing to change my first impression of the place. There were a lot of older visitors around and I figured that at one time this place used to be a posh place for locals to spend a weekend but it was pretty dreary now.

On to Bilboa Sunday where there is a tourist office in the bus terminal and it was open. I received a map showing the location of all the cheap hotels which were all on the other side of the city. However there was internet access right across the street. I also needed some cash but the second ATM I found was working. Now I just had to find a place to stay and figure out how to cross the city. The bus station is next to the football stadium and there was a game starting shortly so the bar I was in was filling up quickly. That was an advantage because I just had to walk against the flow of people going to the game. Although I had the map I was pretty confident about the direction so didn´t use it at all for the first half hour. On my first reading I was amazed to find that I was pretty well on track. I thought that rates might be cheaper on the side of the river away from the old section so headed there and found three hostals plus a one star hotel. I checked out the one star first but predictably didn´t like the price. The first hostal I checked had no room for singles but I was in luck with the second. There was even an Indian restaurant right across the street. My initial exploring trip turned up an internet cafe where I spent two hours in the smoke-filled room trying to catch up on my communications. My eyes are just getting back to normal now. The old section of Bilbao is interesting but generally dirty. I was disappointed actually. It wasn´t the lively friendly place that I remembered from two years ago. The Indian meal was good but not the service or the price. My room was OK but the fire alarm went off during the night probably due to smoking. Unless you are outdoors it is hard to get away from smoke.

Tags: cash card, Travel, Tag Index

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