Bilbao and San Sebastian - Sh*t shoes mate!!

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Boys club were heading off for another holiday, and this one was going to be the most ambitious one so far with a five day road trip across Northern Spain in the offing. Our flight was the usual crack of dawn affair and took us to Bilbao. At the airport the comedy started pre-dawn as Moss had managed to leave his Sun-tan lotion in his hand luggage. This was soon confiscated and in the process Moss had all his belongings stripped out of his bag, revealing to us all the worst pair of shoes ever inflicted on the world - immediately dubbed "sh*t , which stuck for the rest of the holiday. Even the lady behind the x-ray machine turned her nose up at Moss' fashion sense, and the tone was set for the trip!

Arriving in Bilbao, we were soon holed up in our accommodation, but in a break from the norm we were in an en-suite Guesthouse rather than a hostel - Team G.E.L. is heading up-market! The weather was good, and we headed out to enjoy the Spanish cafe culture on our way to probably the city's main attraction, the Guggenheim Museum. In the bright sunshine the building looked impressive, however inside was somewhat of a disappointment. The museum didn't really captivate me, and compared to other modern art museums such as the Tate Modern it seemed a bit flat. Nevertheless there was an ace little cafe just outside which served cold beer and ice cream and had a great view of the museum and over onto the river. On the wander back from the Guggenheim we happened across a small bar which was having its opening night and therefore was offering free beer and unlimited "pinxtos" - small finger foods which are the staple of this area of Spain. Needless to say, we ended up staying in this bar for quite some time and so in true Boys Club fashion by the time we had got back to the guesthouse, changed and ready for the night out it was well gone 11 and with Bilbao not being the biggest of cities we simply couldn't find a restaurant that was open!

Heading on for the night out, things seemed equally quiet, with us struggling to find anywhere that was busy. A few drinks on, for some reason we ended up in a local kareoke bar, with Andy and I first on the mike giving it all for our version of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight". Surprisingly, the locals didn't seem all that impressed!

After hitting a few more bars that all closed on us we ended up in some "Pirates" bar until the early hours before all jumping in a taxi back towards our guesthouse with Shaun "hidden" across the footwells of the back seats - something that seemed to surprise the taxista as we all piled out! Andy and I headed home to crash, but Shaun wasn't willing to let the vibe end there and so the rest of the guys were soon back in a taxi, and with only the words "crack den" to guide them they were off! As only Shaun can, he apparently made an enemy of the meatiest meatface in all of Bilbao and it took an angry Moss and the intervention of a passing stranger to keep Shaun in one piece. That said, the middle finger salute from Shaun as the boys were taking off in a taxi led to a tyre screeching movie style getaway with the meatface in hot pursuit!! Top work boys!

The usual post-checking out time checkout was again achieved, and we made it across the city to pick up our hire car. The hire car turned out to be a tidy little Citroen C4, and we were soon out of the city heading along the coastal road between Bilbao and San Sebastian. We had already arranged accommodation for our third and fourth nights in San Sebastian, but the second night's accommodation was to be arranged on the fly. We had brought along tents as a backup plan, and were going to see what happened. The guidebook mentioned that Leikitio was the nicest town along that stretch of coast and so we headed there and parked up. It turned out to be a beautiful little Spanish costal town with a massive promenade, a couple of decent beaches and a horseshoe shaped bay with a small island at its mouth. This island soon had Shaun's little brain in overdrive with plans for our night out and soon enough we had hatched a harebrain scheme which involved buying a dingy and rowing out to the island after our nightout to camp and watch the sunrise. What possible part of that plan could go wrong!

We found an affordable restaurant that's house speciality seemed to be chicken marinated in salt, and then headed out for an absolutely cracking night out, with Shaun doing his usual ace job as nocturnal guide and us getting thoroughly drunko while hitting many a bar and also enjoy some very loud and rowdy games of table football which seemed to be a very popular pastime in this neck of the woods. Andy also got his comeuppance after his asking to see if he could lift me up and me obliging, he decided that the next logical thing to do would be to throw me into a set of doors and leave me crumpled in a heap. A good old fashioned wrestle soon ensued with independent judge Moss declaring me the winner and Andy someone picking up a nasty glass cut on his arm as something to remember the night by!

Dawn was approaching so we headed back to the beach and pumped up the dingy. This was all achieved pretty easily, but the plan soon started to unravel! When we had been planning our little rowing adventure, the seas had been perfectly calm and getting across the 70 or so metres of open water seemed no problem. However at 5 a.m. the water was distinctly choppy and five drunk lads trying to launch a dingy off a beach without getting wet was never going to happen. Andy decided that the dingy wasn't the best way to cross and so decided to strip down to his smalls and swim across. With Shaun around that was never going to happen and the boxers were soon ripped off him by the Mullet and slung out into the Med.

Adam and I were loaded up with all the bags and started attempting to row across to the island. I wouldn't say things were going brilliantly, but we were making relatively dry progress towards the island when the full horror of a naked Andy came bounding across the shallows and leapt into our fragile dingy with a mighty belly flop. Unfortunately the flimsy construction couldn't quite take it and sea-water rushed in inundating all our bags. In our none too sober states Adam and I didn't really notice this and eventually got the dingy moored up on the island to join Andy. Here the carnage began to reveal itself as we twigged that all our bags had been sitting in a good foot of seawater for the duration of the journey and so pretty much anything remotely electronic was trashed!

Moss and Shaun were still back on the beach, and for some reason I volunteered to take the boat back across to pick them up. My rowing skills were going nowhere fast and so I ended up just jumping fully clothed into the water and towing the boat across to pick the other guys up and get them across to the island where we could take stock. Everything we owned was soaked and Andy seemed to have fared the worst as his bag contained everything that he had brought on the trip - ooops! To make matters worse, one of Andy's favourite shoes had washed up back on shore with Moss and Shaun while we were making the crossing. In their drunken haze they assumed the other one had also been lost out to sea and sent Andy's shoe spiralling back into the water - probably with the send off "sh*t shoes". The other shoe had been safely stored in the dingy all along though and Andy was less than amused when he found out what had happened!

I dashed up to the island's peak to watch an absolutely stunning Sunrise. I would have taken a photo but my camera has succumbed to the gallon of seawater that was now sloshing about inside of it!

We made it to the "campground" we had selected and tried to make the best of our sopping stuff. Shaun and Matich setup a tent inner and managed to sleep in there before rolling off down a hill during the night and coming to rest on a tree. Moss and I selected the comfiest bits of grass that we could and got into our lovely damp sleeping bags and soon passed out, while Andy clambered into the dingy, wrapped part of the tent around him and slept.

Mercifully, the next day dawned blisteringly hot so our damp sleeping arrangements were not too serious an issue and I awoke around midday to spot a Spanish couple at the top of the slope were we had made our campsite looking slightly bemused and disgusted. I'm not really surprised as surveying the area we had crashed out in was absolutely hilarious. All of our soaking wet stuff had somehow been arranged across various rocks and branches in a feat of drunken organisation, and in amongst the tent, clothes, dinghies and other debris were five guys passed out! Its an image I'll never forget!

Heading back was far easier and revealed what we really should have done the previous night. We simply loaded all our stuff into the dingy and then each swam across to the beach with one person towing the dinghy! Not a drop of water made it into the boat and it took no time at all - now if only we had thought of that before - I think the booze may have had something to do with it! Taking stock we had lost an awful lot of stuff between us, I think 3 i-pods, 3 cameras and 2 mobile phones succumbed, as well as most of Andy's favourite items of clothing which Shaun was cheekily eager to take credit with whenever he wanted to get a rise out of Andy. The only person not to lose anything of value was Moss, he had cleverly stored everything he had of value back in the car - although the "sh*t shoes" didn't take too well to the seawater and were "unfortunately" ruined. A guess there's always a silver lining...

By the time we had recovered on the beach it was late afternoon and we then managed to get ourselves back on the road and over to San Sebastian. Despite forgetting to print out the directions to the hostel, Shaun somehow went on memory and managed to get us there first time which was some kind of miracle! We headed our for a night-out and took in a good few bars, but as in Bilbao we struggled to get in anywhere late on in the evening. Moss and Andy headed back to the ranch, and Adam, Shaun and I kept trying to find somewhere that would let us in. Bizarrely, the streets were absolutely packed as it was the start of the "Big Week" festival, it was just that nowhere seemed to be letting people in!

The next day we had to be out of our rooms by 10 for them to be cleaned which was very tough - but we managed to head down to the beach for some good sunbathing and recuperated a bit more there. During the afternoon we wandered around the old town and then climbed up to the top of one of the hilltop viewpoints which overlook the city and the bay. The views were exquisite, but even better was that there was a small family run bar up there which was serving ice cold beer. We stayed up there for hours, just the five of us drinking cold beer and bantering each other in the Sun while enjoying the views. It was superb.

On the wander back we took a trip via a funfair and had a quick blast on the dodgems trying to knock seven bells out of each other. The previous night had seen us endure another disappointing meal, and we decided to take no chances this time so we found a good restaurant overlooking the beach and I got to swing my Spanish into action and book us up a table for later on that evening.

We dashed back to the hostel to change and got back to the restaurant pronto to enjoy an absolutely superb feed. The wine was flowing freely and the meal and banter were top notch. To cap it all we had also got extremely lucky as part of the "big week" festival involved an enormous fireworks display over the bay which we were lucky enough to be able to watch from the comfort of our table!

We headed onwards for our final night-out, but once again the bars seemed to close surprisingly early and all the action spilled out into the street. Here Moss and Andy decided to throw their money at some sort of gypsy who had a little stall setup which allowed you to test your skill and strength by hammering a nail into a block of wood in only four hits! This would probably be tricky enough normally, but factoring a night's worth of drink, the fact that the nail was about 6 inches long and needed to be hammered into what seemed to be a solid piece of mahogany, the boys were soon separated from their cash!

The night began to wind down in the early hours and we began to wander home. Unfortunately Shaun still had his chip fork from the food he had picked up and the wriggly little mullet took great delight in prodding us all with it relentlessly. Andy tried to wrench it off him and stop the endless prodding, but that wriggly little Sahdev somehow wrestled Andy to the ground and as a final insult it ended up with Andy's jeans being ripped open and him slicing up his knee to add to the catalogue of injuries and missing or damaged clothes that had defined Andy's trip!

Our final day say a bit more beach chilling and we managed to get the hire car back in one piece before the flight - though I did manage to stall at least twenty times along the way, at least one occasion being in the middle of a massive roundabout!

The curtain had been brought down on another superb boys club adventure, with some incredible memories and some great times had. The road-trip added a new dimension to Team G.E.L and when this was combined with plenty of time spent by the sea it definitely proved to be both a dangerous and hilarious combination. Hopefully we'll have more of the same when we head off to Barcelona in October.

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