Had a leisurely breakfast, then packed all our stuff up, followed by a nice cappuccino at the restaurant.  Got on the way north by about 11:30.

It wasn’t far to Irun, where we turned west along the coast thru San Sebastian – which is also known as Donostia, its Basque name I believe.  The GPS led us on a very picturesque route all along the coast heading west.

Once again we’re near one of the Camino trails – we’ve seen a couple of signs and some of the hikers have large (fake) clam shells hanging from their backpacks.  

The campground is just outside the town of Zarautz and high up on a hill overlooking the Atlantic.  It’s fairly large and completely different from the last two places we’ve stayed. When you arrive there’s a young lady that intercepts you and tells you where to park before you go in to register.  Once you come out she tells you where to wait for another staff member on a scooter to come and lead you to your little plot. The area we’re in is very crowded – we’re squished in like sardines in a can, but it’s alright since our neighbours on both sides are really nice.  Despite the number of people it’s pretty quiet – no traffic noises and lots of trees and birds. There’s a path down to the beach that we’ll have to investigate at some point.

We setup camp, then drove down to the town to look for a store – no luck finding one open.  Again – the extremely annoying 4 or 5 hour lunch! We stopped for a quick drink at a bar – and I was once again bothered by screaming kids.  There was a group at the next bar to us that had several small children at one table and the adults at another, and no matter how much the kids screamed they were generally ignored by the parents, who were relaxing with drinks and chatting with their friends.

I’m not advocating stuffing a socks in the kids’ mouths or hitting them with a stick to get them to be quiet – but the parents could at least not just ignore them.  Patience with screaming kids is a virtue that I’m still working on, I guess.

Back at camp we read for a bit – discovered that we could actually get electricity, and are very fortunately right near the wi-fi tower.  A little later we went down to the restaurant/bar to eat – we picked a table outside, as we had Mo with us, but the waitress said that we would have to go around the corner to another outside area.  It was a large, rather dismal place of concrete and not much else.

I ordered the pork filets – presented much like the chicken I had the other night – three very thin pieces pounded down and lightly breaded, with a bunch of fries.  It wasn’t bad, but not exactly what I think of as ‘local specialities’.

Partway thru our meal we were invaded by – guess what? – screaming kids.  Several families had arrived together and were all sitting in the area we had originally been in and told to move from.  All of their kids swarmed around the corner to our area and were running, jumping and screaming at the top of their lungs – we moved inside, telling the young waitress that it was because of the kids – she didn’t stop us even with Mo.

I was actually surprised later that it went quiet so early at the area where our tents are – no loud music or late, loud conversations – or even screaming children!  Everything basically shut down and was peaceful at a very reasonable time.

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