Let the Adventure Begin!

Bilbao, Gijon, Lisbon, Poritmao, and Cadiz

I’d like to start by apologizing in advance for the length of this post.  Now that we are finally underway, I’m trying to establish a routine for documenting our journey, but I haven’t quite figured out how it’s going to work.  I made a point of making notes each day when we returned to the ship from exploring each port, but I probably shouldn’t have waited so long to compile it all.  It doesn’t help that our first several stops have been day stops, so we’ve been very busy.  Once we catch up to the original itinerary there should be more multiday stops which should help.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about our adventures.  A big part of the reason we started this blog was to keep family and friends up to date on our travels, but also just to document for our future selves to look back at.

New Cabin

To start off these are the promised photos of our obstructed view cabin.  Mike still hasn’t made the time to do a video tour, but I took quite a few pictures.  We are very comfortable in our cabin and have settled in really well.

And now on to our ports of call!

Bilbao (Getxo), Spain

Our first port where we were actually able to disembark was Bilbao, Spain.  Although the cruise terminal is actually located in the town of Getxo just outside of Bilbao.  Our first order of business was to find the bus to get us to Costco…I know that’s terrible, but we needed some supplies, mostly cheap beer for Mike and of course a hot dog.  Google Maps is great for public transportation, and we quickly located the bus we needed and the closest stop.  Unfortunately, it turns out you need to pay with cash or a transit card of which we had neither.  So, we walked down to the Information booth next to the Vizcaya Bridge to find out where to get a transit card.  The Vizcaya Bridge is a large metal structure built in 1893, and it was the world’s first to carry people and traffic on a high suspended gondola.  It’s pretty incredible to see.  You can buy tickets to take an elevator up and walk across the top of the bridge, but we were still trying to get to Costco.  With directions in hand, we headed for the nearest Metro station to purchase a transit card and then to the nearest bus stop.  We made it to Costco in time to meet up with a group of friends from the ship who were kind enough to take our purchases back with them in an Uber while we caught the bus back. 

After unloading our supplies back at the ship, we headed back out on foot to explore Getxo.  I cannot express how beautiful and clean the community is.  There is an incredible mixture of architectural styles and some extremely impressive homes.  Getxo was originally a summer getaway for the wealthy before people started living there fulltime.  We walked along the beach and found a funicular that took us up the hill into the residential area.  There we found a lovely walking path that had a treed canopy.  Our walk led us back down to the central hub of town.  The shopping area downtown is beautiful and quaint and overall, it’s just an absolutely lovely place.

We were fortunate enough to have 2 full days in Bilbao, so on our second day we took the metro into Bilbao proper and wandered around for most of the day.  We got off the metro and headed for the Guggenheim.  Art isn’t really our thing, so we settled for exploring the outside of the museum.  It’s an extremely interesting building with some unique sculptures. 

The museum sits on the river, so we headed up the river towards the ‘Old Town’ and wandered the beautiful narrow streets.  It’s so hard to capture these areas because the streets are so narrow that you can’t really get a good picture, but they are stunning.  After exploring the old town, we went in search of a funicular that Mike found on Google Maps.  After wandering around and not finding the entrance we finally let Google provide the directions.  The Funikularreko is a cable drawn railcar that take you up the mountain for epic views over Bilbao which sits in the valley.

One of my favourite things about Bilbao was the elevators; unfortunately, we didn’t think to take pictures of them.  The city is built in the valley, and there are several steep sections on the slopes surrounding the city.  There are literally elevators in the streets that will take you up several levels.  Occasionally there were escalators as well.  Given that we can’t seem to keep elevators and escalators running indoors in Canada we were extremely impressed at the condition of the ones outdoors in Bilbao.

Gijon, Spain

Gijon was literally a port in the storm, we were trying to stay out of the path of Hurricane Kirk, so we moved over to Gijon for a day and a half.  The first day was when the hurricane was passing by, and the captain asked all residents to stay on board due to high winds.  They also had trouble with our gangway, and it was incredibly steep (there are no steps on it) and unsafe, so we were happy to stay on the ship for the day to ride out the weather.

The next morning, they set up the gangway on a lower level and we were able to head to shore for the morning.  We only had about an hour and a half to explore, so it was a very quick visit.  We were docked in a commercial shipyard, so we took the shuttle bus provided, and it dropped us downtown by the beach.  The waterfront was beautiful, and it was a gorgeous bright day. 

The one thing Mike wanted to do was go to a railway museum that he found, and we were lucky enough to stumble over it just as it was opening.  The Museo Ferrocarril is the largest and one of the most important railway collections in Spain detailing the development of Asturias’ railways.  It was really interesting, and admission was free.  Afterwards we did a quick lap through town before heading back to the bus.  We would have loved more time, especially since Gijon is known to be the cider capital of Spain.  The tree is made of cider bottles…

Lisbon, Portugal

We were lucky enough to be docked right in the heart of Lisbon, so we walked off the ship and right into the bustle of life in Portugal.  This is our first new country on our journey, and we only had one day to explore, so we covered a lot of ground.  Almost immediately we headed up steep cobble streets towards the Castelo de S. Jorge.  We are one of 3 cruise ships docked in Lisbon right now and by far the smallest, so there was a long line to get into the castle.  We opted to take a lap around the outside and carry on.  While wandering the streets around the castle we found a colony of street cats, but I wasn’t able to reach them for pets.

There was a ruined gothic church on the horizon, so we made our way in that general direction.  It was the Carmo Archaelogical Museum and just across the street was the Elevador de Santa Justa.  Using Google maps Mike located a green space, so we followed the Av. da Liberdade to the Parque Eduardo VII.  It was a lovely walk, and we ended up stumbling over the Estufa Fria Botanical Garden.  It was only 3.50 euro for entrance, and it was by far the best botanical garden we’ve ever been to.  Given Mike’s love of taking photos of plants, we’ve been to quite a few, so that’s saying something. 

Afterward we made our way back to the waterfront and followed it back to the ship.  It turns out if we had walked down the waterfront away from the ship, we could have accessed the main shopping area from the Praca do Comercio square without hiking up quite so many steep streets, but we enjoyed our day, nonetheless.  As we sailed away that evening Mike got some great photos of Lisbon’s Golden Gate- style bridge Ponte 25 de Abril and Santuario de Cristo Rei (Sanctuary of Christ the King) statue.

It was a whirlwind tour, but we feel like we saw a fair amount in our 20 kilometers of walking.  If our itinerary stands, we will be back to Lisbon for 3 days prior to hitting the Mediterranean, so we’ll have more time to explore at that point.

Portimao, Portugal

Portimao was our next stop, it’s a port city in southern Portugal and it has several amazing beaches.  You have to take stairs down the cliff to get to the beaches unless you enter at the marina end.  There are cliffs and rock formations all along that break the beach up, so certain sections are only accessible via stairs.  We came on a Sunday, so most of the shops were closed, but we found plenty of areas to explore. 

We started our day walking through town and found several lovely squares with shops and fountains.  We really just wandered around for a couple of hours and then made our way in the direction of the cliffs at the end of the beach.  There is a path along the cliffs that leads to Lej Frodo, an incredible lookout that gives you epic views of the cliffs and caves along the coastline.  You can take boat tours out to the caves as well, but they haven’t run in about 4 days due to rough conditions.  There was another cat colony along the pathway as well and I managed to find 2 cats that were willing to be pet, it made my day.

Once we got back to the beach that runs all the way to the marina we headed down and walked in the water.  It was very refreshing!  At the end of the beach, we walked along the breakwater at the entrance to the port.  The waves were pretty intense; we watched a small sailboat leave and another coming in. 

We didn’t make it across the river to the old village of Ferragudo, so hopefully we’ll make it back someday.  We covered over 20 kilometres in our wanderings, so we feel we got a pretty good taste of Portimao.

Cadiz, Spain

Once again, we only had one day to explore in Cadiz.  It was supposed to be a rainy morning, so we packed up the umbrellas and headed out.  We ran into one of our shipmates early on at the Monumento a la Constitucion de 1812; it was completed in 1929 to commemorate the Constitution of 1812.  Together we headed up onto the wall surrounding a good portion of the city.  We followed it along until we found a botanical garden to explore.  I found a black cat in the garden, but it wasn’t interested in being pet ☹.  There were amazing magnolia trees along the wall and in the botanical garden.

Just as it started to rain, we arrived at the Castillo de Santa Catalina, a castle built for military defence in the 17th century.  It is now a multipurpose cultural space, and there was an art exhibition where the artist painted several different canvases that combined to create a 360-degree skyline of Cadiz.  They also had a really interesting display about the Cadiz Explosion in 1947.  On the night of August 18th of 1947, a munitions storage in the Submarine Defence Base exploded for unknown reasons.  There were approximately 1737 sea mines, torpedoes, and depth charges containing 200 tonnes of TNT and amatol in the storage facility.  The explosion wiped out the military facility, and seriously damaged the districts of San Severiano and San Jose.  Miraculously only 147 people were killed most of which were on night shift in the Echevarrieta shipyard next to the storage facility. 

Once the rain stopped, we headed for the Castillo de San Sebastian, an island fortress.  It has an amazing bridge all the way out to the fortress called the Puente hierro.  There were blow holes along the bridge out to the Castillo.

The Catedral de Cadiz was very impressive and so was the Puerta de Tierra, the original entrance to the walled section of the city. 

We wandered back through the narrow city streets where we saw lovely squares and streets with beautiful lanterns and balconies.  We tried to explore the Mercado Central de Abastos de Cadiz (the central market), but it closed down early. 

Cadiz is a lovely town to explore, and you could just endlessly wander the beautiful streets.  Our next few ports we have 2 days in each port, so we’ll be able to slow down and take in a little more of the cities we’re visiting.

That’s all for now!  Again, sorry for my lengthy ramblings….  I don’t want to post too often, but I’ll try not to let the posts get quite so long going forward. 

We had our first experience with champagne sailing as we left Cadiz…the seas were unbelievably calm and the sunset was incredible.