Wednesday, July 23rd: The patron saints of the Basque language are apparently very chatty and told all of the other Gods about my untended mutilation of one of their names and they all started to cry at the same time. Otherwise I don’t have an explanation for what awaits us this morning. The nine o’clock rain hits us at about 3 in the morning, without the tiniest chance to pack up anything. At least I get to close the windows in the front of the Grrrmaneta this time. The door in the back I leave open, so the mattress and the pillows get moistened a bit. But surely they would dry later on. What a naive thought. It takes us some time to pack. I manage to rebuild Grrrmaneta into a five-seater with the kids inside and barely stepping outside myself. But by the time we have everything in the car, we are completely soaked through. And all of our stuff is soaked through. Especially the clothes we washed in the evening and wanted to dry outside overnight. I decide to head over to the reception and pay our bill in my pyjamas because I don’t have any more dry clothes at hand. We leave beautiful Hondarribia accompanied by the tears of the Gods who must be very, very pissed because the rain follows us until we reach Pamplona. There they apparently hand over to some Gods of wrath.
We intended to stop in Pamplona, maybe visit the town center and get some breakfast. Impossible. We don’t get around in the town, we are circling everything multiple times, but can’t find even a place to park. Okay then, no breakfast in Pamplona, I get it. At a roundabout I nearly crash Grrrmaneta when a driver from the inside lane decides to suddenly take the exit while I was still looking for the correct path out of this hell. Good thing I sometimes have a sixth sense and so I had already slowed down before suddenly stepping on the brake. For the rest of the trip (and probably a long time after), cars with scratches and dents get labeled „they tried to have breakfast in Pamplona“.
Breakfast turns into snacks from the car and we skip coffee. At a very dusty and run down parking spot near a vineyard we decide to take a break. My husband unpacks the tent and lays it out flat to dry for some time. I do the same with my damp clothes. It’s not raining anymore and it’s about 24 degrees already. We must be close to the desert now. I decide to change since I still wear my wet pyjamas and have been driving in my chunky beach sandals, and like a foreshadowing of things that will happen about a week later, the vineyard farmer decides to take care of exact that row next to the parking space the moment I am standing there with no pants on. But I don’t care, all I know in this moment is I have dry clothes on and warming up. Next stop Zaragoza.
