The time came to leave Barcelona and head into real Spain for some days. We began our trip by flying to Bilbao where we were met by this message at the airport These people were nice enough to give us this car so that we could head to this main event where from this car park we could catch our first view of a remarkable building. We also enjoyed the trilingual nature of things with the Basque translations of all of the signs.

We walked up these steps to be greeted by this puppy dog and then zoomed in and even further to try and figure it out.

Next we walked down the neighboring bridge to try and absorb the design of the museum. The lines and pieces were remarkable

as was the interaction with the river not to mention the café

Although they wouldn't let us take photos inside the museum, we did manage to get this picture inside the men's room and our obligatory phone booth picture

We fought the traffic out of Bilbao and then the maps into Santillana del Mar (town of 3 lies – not a holy place, not flat and not on the water) where we had a dinner of minestrone tortilla (aka potato omelet) pimento rellenos shrimp green beans and chicken that kept Benjamin going at a fast rate All of the food served by this waitress made us quite happy

but didn't keep us from taking this unintelligible picture which we'll try to use in our Santillana By Blur series.