3/05/2025
Pippa had been looking forward to seeing The Puppy since she read about it years ago. It's a large sculpture of a Westie made from flowers and it's sitting just by the side of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
Bilbao was a place we'd wanted to visit and it was to be our last stay in Spain before getting back into France. I'd visited a good twenty if not thirty years ago with my bike; I'd stayed here at either end of a bike tour of the mountains. It reminded me then, and equally so now, of Newcastle upon Tyne, it had a past in heavy industry and boat building, it was a port near the coast, and it was now reinventing itself and tranforming its riverside, the Nervión, in dramatic ways.
We'd stay here for two nights, the second being for Pippa's birthday.
04/05/2025
We're going use as many forms of public transport as we can, we fail to get a cruise up the river Nervión, but we do take a tram, a bus, the metro, shank's pony and a taxi.
The itinerary for the day is basically Pippa's choice, since it's her birthday, so we're going to go to the flower market, explore the old quarter, have breakfast, go out for dinner and generally, in spite of the grey skies and sirimiri (drizzle in Bilbao), have a good time.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.