San Sebastian

San Sebastian is on the north coast of Spain, pretty close to the French border, so we had a long day of driving before reaching this beautiful little beach town. Little is definitely the right word too, it’s basically one long beach with a few blocks of city behind it.

We stayed at a hotel up a(nother) hill that had a great view of the bay. From there we took a lot of walks down to the beach, pretty much always searching for food. Unfortunately it was pretty rainy everyday that we were there, so we had to find other things to do besides enjoy the beach.

One day we went to the aquarium, which is very cool, though very small. The main attraction is a huge tank with sharks, turtles, stingrays, eels, and various fish that has a walkway through it, so you feel like you're underwater. Besides that, there are about 8 tanks of water for you to look inside with seahorses, jellyfish, and tropical fish. We saw the whole thing in about 15 minutes, so we just hung out in the underwater walkway for a while to get our money’s worth.

Another day we dedicated to doing our laundry, which was way overdue. It took a while, but we kept busy checking out local bars and their versions of tapas, some not so good.

Most of the nights after dinner we found ourselves at an outdoor bar that overlooked the bay and watched the tide come almost all the way up the beach. The view is superb - there are two sort of mountains that form the ends of the “C” that makes the bay, and between them there’s an island thats inaccessible by land. On the mountain to the right there’s a huge statue of Jesus (or so I think, we never made it all the way up there) that’s lit up until late into the night, and on the other two points we could see lighthouses flashing just the slightest bit in our direction every few moments.

Our crowning glory day was the only day that it was really sunny and warm, and it also happened to be the 4th of July. We made our way to the beach with deli stuff to make sandwiches and a little sangria. We spent a few hours just laying in the sun, sometimes diving into the cold Atlantic, but mostly just soaking up the good weather.

All in all, I would say that San Sebastian is a pretty great place to visit for a nice, quiet couple of days. Just make sure to check the weather patterns before you go.