Tuna
Sunday 25 May 2014
It was a gentle start to today, which was a day of driving to somewhere else. First stop was a very bad very expensive coffee and a walk around San Sebastian. It is a pretty place, but very quiet on a wet Sunday morning, really nice for it. So much of what we have read says San Sebastian is ‘a place you’ll fall in love with and won’t want to leave’. It is very different to the smaller cities we’ve been through further south. Their old city, well, just doesn’t look that old when compared to Segovia, Cordoba or Granada. But it is very different, more influenced I think by the French and English. For ‘a place to fall in love with’, I’d recommend Segovia.
Next stop was lunch, so we drove a bit further down a road and got to Pamplona.
It is an excellent place. Again, it is Sunday so most things are closed and there weren’t too many people out. We managed to park right under the bull ring, an impressive structure. Unfortunately it was closed so we went in search of a decent coffee. We found a nice little bar/tapas/restaurant place that made a fantastic coffee followed by sensational pintxos (tapas) and a white wine. They have won prizes for their pintxos they are that good.
We thought it only fair to share, so we wandered elsewhere for lunch. It was also only 12.30pm so way too early to be sitting down to lunch. We had a lovely stroll through the pretty streets of central Pamplona. The bars were full of locals sitting down (actually they stand up) for a beer and pintxos before lunch.
We walked down one pedestrian mall and found lots of shops selling ‘running with the bulls’ stuff and eventually worked out we were on the route (it’s very short). So rather than ‘running with the bulls’ (which only happens in early July) we meandered around. Finally found a place that did a fantastic Menu of the Day. We had a simple tagliatelle with mushroom and bacon, followed by whole little calamari with peppers and scallops of thin pork with a mushroom and pepper filling, follow by a delicious crème caramel. Awesome! Oh yeah, the set price menu also came with half a bottle of wine each. By this time it was just after 2pm and the place was gearing up for the lunch crowd with started hurtling through the door at 2pm on the dot. The place was heaving. Good choice, excellent food.
A further easy drive down the road we got to our destination of Jaca, a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
There isn’t much in Jaca, and we’ve found out all the supermarkets are closed on Sundays. But it is quiet, we have lovely one bedroom apartment (at bargain basement price of €50/night) overlooking the foothills of the Pyrenees watching a lightning storm roll through.
All is good.