The longest travel day…
Leaving San Sebastian we had to take a long trip to reach our interim stop in Portugal. There used to be a direct train along the top of Spain to Portugal that was utilized by those making the pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. However, during COVID it was stopped and hasn’t restarted yet. So we have to travel from San Sebastian heading the opposite way into central Spain to Madrid for a 2 hour layover then the train heads back up north toward Santiago. We left San Sebastian at 9 am and were to arrive in Madrid at 2 pm for our expected lunch in Madrid. Luckily we splurged and extra $3 each for first class so we had lots of room.
However, when we were 500 yards from the Madrid train station, our train abruptly came to a stop. All in all, we sat there in the heat in a stopped train for 2 hours. The few announcements that were made were in Spanish and none of the train crew spoke English. Luckily we found someone in front of us who did speak Spanish. We both have some Spanish speaking ability but the rapid speech over an unclear intercom made it difficult to follow even for the Spanish. The only word we recognized was fire. We found out that there had been an electrical fire at the station and it was shut down completely.
Masks are still required on public transport in Spain so the entire day we were in masks. Technically you are supposed to show proof of vaccination as well but no one asked. Barry reasons that it is mostly EU people on the train so they don’t expect Americans or Brits to be traveling that way.
Luckily, we didn’t miss our connecting train because all trains were stopped so once we got into the station we had 1.5 hours until our train did leave for the next leg. Because of this, we didn’t get any lunch that day.
The trip to Madrid on through to Ourense goes through the mountains of northers Spain to the flat, dry farmlands of central Spain and a few pine forests. It is very much like leaving the Cascades and traveling through central Washington on through to Spokane. It goes on for hours and there is very little to see so I didn’t find any interesting photo ops.
Once we left Madrid for Ourense, we traveled at 152 mph and we mostly went through tunnels in the mountains for a large part of the journey. Again no photo ops due to the terrain, speed and the fading light.
We stayed in a nice hotel in Ourense called NH Ourense. Due to our late arrival we didn’t have any time to explore the city. Our take was it is a “local” city not used to tourists. We did find a place for dinner but no one there spoke English and although we knew what we wanted from the menu from our limited Spanish and even pointed, I didn’t get what I ordered so mostly went without food that day. The staff was brusque and didn’t care. Our hotel room was very modern and had the best bed of our trip so far.
The train station there was very nice as easy to move through. The trip from Ourense on through to Porto was a bit more scenic as we wound our way along the Minho river. Unfortunately, our first mishap occurred somewhere along the way and although I took a few great photos, by the time we got to Porto, I had lost my English phone that I had been taking photos with. I also brought my American phone with me so I still had a camera for the rest of our trip but no longer had free roaming for phone calls and no new photos for today’s post.
