Day 16 and 17, Logrono and a detour to Bilbao

Spanish style pub crawl in Logrono
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Day 16 & 17, June 2^nd and June 3rd

Logrono and detour to Bilbao

From Viana we took a taxi to the train station in Logrono. It’s a big town, and we had about 5 hours before the train was scheduled to leave so we knocked around Logrono for the afternoon. The lady at the tourist office recommended lunch on a pedestrian street nearby. It turned out to be a lot of fun. On Saturday afternoons the tapas bars host the Spanish version of pub crawl. Folks stop at each bar for a drink and tapa and moving on to the next spot. This was right up our alley. After a little sightseeing and bench-napping we headed back to the station for the train to Bilbao.

Waiting for the train
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The train was sturdy, old, and slow. Only three stops, but it took almost three hours to cover the 90 miles to Bilbao. Still, these were breakneck speeds compared with our 4.5km/hour pace of the last two weeks. The Hotel Ercilla was very nice, I got lucky with a real web bargain. The hotel, had excellent heated towel racks so we spent the rest of the evening washing our clothes and over the next day dried them over this most precious of devices.

Sunday morning and afternoon was for the museums. In addition to the Guggenheim for modern art, there’s a very fine one with the more traditional stuff. I always like more classical art better (things that look like something you can recognize) but the Guggenheim building and the works inside were a pleasant surprise.

The Guggenheim
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Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s made of concrete and steel, clad with panels of bright titanium. The pamphlet calls it the shape of a ‘blossoming metallic flower’. It stands in an area of many more traditional buildings so it’s been panned by some locals. It actually fits in very well and the building itself is worth the price of admission.

That’s a good thing because it’s huge but basically had expositions of only two artists. One was a Spanish guy (name started with a “P”) who mostly drew geometric lines and made sculptures that were solid versions of same. The other, Ansel Kiefer, a German, was more interesting. He liked using lead, mud, rust, and sticks but his art had real themes (mostly depressing though) and you could begin to wrap your head around it.

The rest of Sunday was for relaxing and bracing ourselves for the next six days of march on the camino before our next break in Burgos.