Bilbao is a green city, settled into hills and mountains. The centre fits neatly into the horseshoe shape made by the river. Looking up and down many streets, we could see the surrounding mountains in both directions. But the big surprise was that nearly everyone was wearing masks outside – not just indoors or in shops but just walking down the street. However we were never asked to provide our Covid certs anywhere or questioned about covid tests.

Tapas bars are everywhere, and wine is gloriously cheap – about €2.50 a glass, (sometimes less) and often accompanied by free plates of cured meat and chorizos…even if you don’t want them.  Vegetarianism is a challenging option here as meat is king and fish is queen.

The huge attraction in Bilbao is the Guggenheim and once you lay eyes on it, you see why. This weird floating structure rises out of the river, part boat, part fish and winds under a bridge.  Buskers were playing classical music outside which only added to the gentle craziness of the whole experience. There’s a enormous colourful sculpture of a puppy, planted with real flowers on the plaza outside…defying all perspective. The website said that tickets must be bought online but we decided to see if we could get in anyway – there was a short queue and after about 10 minutes, we were in without issue (again no checking of covid certs). The building inside is just as disorientating as you’d expect – we had difficulty finding the exit.

The old town on the right bank of the river is full of cobbled winding streets with dishevelled buildings and tables set out along the streets. It’s a great area to just wander around, browse the shops, people watch and get lost in…and we ate great seafood here.

Our hotel was a ‘no frills’ option called the Ibis Budget Bilbao City which we picked because it had parking but when we arrived, it didn’t have any parking left anyway so we had to drive a few streets over to find parking. This was a budget hotel in all aspects apart from price – it was €130 a night without breakfast (or parking). The room was small, the towels were thin and tiny, Caoimhin kept hitting his head on a shelf, we were on the sixth floor and looked directly into another room across a small courtyard – we could even see their toothbrushes lined up by the sink.

We really liked Bilbao and the weather was perfect for wandering around – about 26C during the day with cool evenings.

It’s was a dirty, misty morning on the way to Rosslare for the 10.15 am ferry. There was a reasonable amount of work traffic and we sympathised with all the poor devils making their way to offices and factories.

We arrived at check-in gate in Rosslare, handed over passports, Covid Certs, Spanish QR Health Code Cert that we had got the day before. We thought that we were all organised but there was a problem! We had filled in a group form to get the Spanish QR CODE, inputted both our details on this FCS form and the Spanish Authorities had sent us the QR code which we presumed covered the two of us….not so. It only covered Caoimhin. So I had to fill out a form to get my code sent to me. This form is not the most straightforward as the drop down boxes kept sticking …we had arrived on plenty of time but I was still panicking and my fingers were sticky…with hand cream and sweat but eventually i got the QR code on my phone. But if you are a couple or group, fill out individual FCS forms and ignore the group option to get your Spanish QR code.

Before I could recover from all that excitement, we had more …. we were in the ferry queue and the car wouldn’t start, the battery seemed to be dead😯. Luckily, three burly bikers from Cork and a barefoot German in a campervan gave us a push so we got on the boat. At this stage, I was devouring the food supplies that we brought with us for the journey with the stress.

The boat, the Connemara, was described as a ‘no frills’ service. This ‘no frills’ was on the website and on the tickets. We had to book a cabin, no option to just get a seat or portion of floor. Our cabin was a 4 Beth but the other top bunk beds were folded away giving us plenty of space with a porthole which gave lots of light and views of the ocean. The sheets were clean, the pillows were good and the beds were comfy. Towels were supplied and the ensuite shower was hot and powerful. There was a bar, self service restaurant and a little shop that only opened at a few selected hours and sold souvenirs, wine, spirits and perfume. But not bad for ‘no frills.’ There was no WiFi (there was an option to pay between €5 and €25 depending on data)

This slow transitioning from one country to another was restful. We looked at Google maps and followed our relatively slow progress, a blue dot in the ocean. The rocking motion of the boat and the dull sound of the engine was soothing and it was even restful not to feel the urge to look at our phones. We were lucky that the weather was good, the sea was calm with hardly a ripple except for the dolphins that somersaulted near the bow on the second morning in the Bay of Biscay.

There was a little flutter of unease as we sat into our car after almost thirty hours on board. Would the car start? But the engine turned over without a bother and we negotiated the steep ramp to disembark and head into Bilbao driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.

June 2021

So the day has finally come to cross the line and move to the farside of my working life to the land of retirement where everyday is a Friday. I’m excited, delighted and sad at the same time. The French intellectual Anatole France said: ‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.’

After working in the same place (although it has changed names – Ardkeen Hospital, Waterford Regional Hospital, University Hospital Waterford) for most of my working life, it’s a wrench to go and leave friends and colleagues behind. I started working almost forty years ago in the Biochemistry Laboratory of Ardkeen Hospital and although I have come and gone with numerous leaves for travel, education, more travel and child-rearing, I have always come back. I’m sixty years old and one of the questions that I ask myself is ‘How can I possibly be this age?’ but I am, and consider myself so lucky to have got this far. That big number was looming on the horizon like a black cloud all year but now that I’m here, its all sunshine and rainbows and even a little pot of gold!

Travel is a huge passion – I love the thrill of going to new places and meeting new people. I don’t like to plan too much or have a detailed itinerary – that feels like being sewn into a straitjacket. And luckily I have a husband who feels the same way. I traveled a lot in South East Asia in my twenties and we took a year off in 2007/2008 and traveled around South America, Australia, Vietnam, China and Russia with our three children who were eight, ten and eleven at the time – a journey that evolved as we went along, having started with one-way tickets from Dublin to Buenos Aires, Argentina because this was the cheapest flight we could find to South or Central America. Now my husband, Caoimhin, is going to take another year out from work (he’s four years younger than me) – he’s calling it his gap-year. So with precious time and some money(I don’t have a huge pension because of all the leave I had), we can hit the road. But this is 2021, the second year of the Covid pandemic and there are restrictions and quarantining associated with travel. So we decided to travel in Europe to begin with. We investigated buying a campervan but they are expensive and in high demand at the moment. Ideally we would love to buy and convert a small electric van. We already have an electric car – a 2015 Nissan Leaf – which we love but the range of 125 kilometres on a full change is a bit limiting for long haul travel. So for now we are going to go in our other car (nine year old Kia Ceed which we call the guzzler) with a tent. Keep it simple is our motto. We have booked a ferry from Rosslare to Bilbao (one way) in Northern Spain departing on August 10. We have vague notions of walking part of the Portuguese Camino and maybe driving to Greece and I feel myself drawn o the Balkans but we’ll see what happens. Time will tell

But first we will do some camping in Ireland