Some Not Blanca, Some Blanca

Bilbao was strange and wonderful. A very diverse city, much more so than the parts of Madrid and Burgos we saw. We reprised one of our first meals in Spain nearly 40 years ago by eating suckling pig and suckling lamb for dinner (and feeling appropriately delighted, nauseated and guilty) and slept the sleep of the overfed.

In the morning we headed for the Guggenheim Bilbao, a remarkable museum on the city's river. The first exhibit we saw was by an artist, Richard Serra, whose work we'd seen at the Dia Beacon in the Hudson Valley. He creates massive spiral works in metal that one walks through and that make the walker extremely dizzy and disoriented. Then we saw a very odd anime exhibit by a Japanese artist, Hilda de Klimt's mystical paintings, and an exhibit with light that made it seem as if we were walking through solid objects and caused us more dizziness and finally an acute panic as we tried to find our way out.

We left Bilbao, ascending the Pyrenees through crazy switchbacks that made me wonder how Blanca and her entourage ever managed such a journey. We headed toward Roncesvalles, a tiny village high in the Pyrenees. It is a town that Blanca probably passed through on her way to France, and she certainly passed through it in my book. Historically, it's the site of a 778 AD battle between the French king Charlemagne's army and the Basques, though in the epic poem "The Song of Roland" (quoted in The Queen's Granddaughter) it is reinvented as a battle between the French and the Muslims. 

The church where Blanca
may/may not have worshipped

Me on the Camino

It's a beautiful mountain village with lots of ski-type lodges, and the Camino de Santiago passes right through it, ensuring that indeed it was probably on Blanca's route since there
were very few other roads over the mountains in her day. We saw numerous pilgrims in worn boots and heavy packs and ate a fabulous lunch of squab and wild mushrooms (Phil had to pick buckshot out of the squab). We looked at a chapel that existed in 1200 where Blanca probably worshipped when she stopped there and another slightly newer church that featured a stained-glass window commemorating the battle in 1212 where Blanca's father finally conquered the Almohads, ending the many years of peace in Castile.

And thence to the seaside resort of Biarritz, beloved by Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill (I like to imagine them at dinner together), where Blanca definitely never went, down the mountains and through innumerable roundabouts, causing the day's usual amount of angst and profanity.