Today was a travel day. We had to get from Nantes near the mouth of the Loire river in France, down to San Sebastian, Spain just across the border. We could have taken the train, but that would have been a 9 hour journey, while it's only a 6 hour drive. Driving would also let us make some stops along the way as we drove down the coast, so we decided to rent a car. With gas and tolls, it ended up being more than we were expecting, but it was worth doing once.
We got moving a little later than we would have preferred so we decided that we could realistically only make two stops, one of which had to be for lunch. We ended up having lunch in Pons at a local restaurant with a very weird menu. Catherine had a random plate of three dishes: tomato & mozzarella salad, thai curry rice and strawberries & creme desert. I had a very good blood sausage with masted potatoes and an apple sauce.
After lunch, we decided to stop to do a tasting in Cognac. It's a little north of Bordeaux but the timing was better. It was a little bit of a different tasting. They had both Pineaux and Cognac to taste. Pineaux is a fortified wine (fortified with Cognac) that comes from the Cognac region. The ones we tasted were aged either 5 or 10 years and they did both a white and a red blend. Cognac is a brandy made with different grapes and then distilled. For the tasting, they pointed to the mantle on the fireplace and asked which ones we would like to try. There was everything from a 7 year bottle all the way to a 70 year bottle. We ended up trying the 12 year and one from 1980. We just couldn't bring ourselves to try to super old one when we wouldn't be buying a bottle of it. Both were excellent, but, unsurprisingly, the 1980 one was special, albeit still out of our price range as it turned out. We ended up leaving with a Pineaux and a bottle of the 12 year.
After the tasting, we headed south. We did a flyby of Bordeaux and made our way towards the border. As we got past Bordeaux, the scenery changed. The deciduous trees disappeared and were replaced by what was obviously plantations of pine trees. They were everywhere. Apparently it's the largest managed forest in Europe and the wood is used for all sorts of typical things (plywood, paper, etc). Our drive ended at the Biarritz airport. It's super expensive to take a car across the border, but we could drop it off at the airport in Biarritz and then take a bus directly to San Sebastian, which was only supposed to take 40min. It sounded perfect on paper, but the bus turned out to take twice as long and was pretty hard on the stomach as it made many stops along the way that meant going through a number of small roundabouts.
When we arrived in San Sebastian, we walked to the Airbnb to get our room and drop off our stuff. Lodging in San Sebastian is super expensive, so we ended up using Airbnb to get a room. The other rooms were being rented out separately to some Argentineans and some Germans. There was a shared kitchen and bathroom.
For dinner, our host recommended dinner at Topa as it was a lower priced restaurant done by one of the guys with the famous Michelin star restaurants. It felt like it would fit right in with the San Francisco hipster scene. Loud music, lots of reclaimed wood, edgy art and good food. It was a Basque-Mexican fusion cuisine (for lack of a better description) that included mostly smaller plates. We enjoyed some fish tacos, grilled peppers and fresh basque cider among other things. A great start to our time in Spain!
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