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Biarritz was okay but not Madrid

I stayed at a friend's place in Pamplona for two weeks and it was fine. Then I decided to head for Morocco after not finding another place to stay in Spain. To do that I grabbed a train to Madrid and that is where I spent four days of misery. Normally I just travel through Madrid, but this was different, it was the 1st of August.

I do not like big cities and Madrid is just that. After finding a place to stay I went online to check my bank balance. For some odd reason I could not get into my bank account online, no matter how I tried to do so. The first hostal was not great. I wandered around and finally found another one that was a lot better. My plan was to go to Morocco for a while, now with the bank problem I had to make a decision. It was not a pleasant one, I must return to England and sort it out. My bank had been taken over by another one and I was told everything would be okay.

The best and cheapest way was to return to Pamplona and head for Biarritz Airport to fly into London Gatwick (which is a lot closer than Heathrow). A travel agency I had used before did it at a reasonable cost. Then I found out that there is a direct bus to Bairritz that only takes couple of hours. However you could not buy the ticket in the intercity bus station, it had to be online and that was impossible to do because of the existing problem, I could buy nothing online. The lady at the agency who did my flight found there was one seat left on the bus and got my ticket for me. The flight was on the 5th of August. I hung around until the bus left.

So what is Biarritz like?

Many years ago I did a bit of body surfing there. The beach was named Chambre da Amour, which means love room. I mentioned it to one French guy who body surfs and he agreed that the waves there were great. People on the whole were friendly, but like Spain not many spoke English—blame that on de Gaulle (like Franco). I had grabbed a local number 11 bus into the center and it was crawling with tourists.

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That's the Bay of Biscay in the background.

My stomach wanted some food and there was this so called Italian restaurant that served the most vile Spaghetti Bolognese I have ever tasted. The noodles were cut short, very tough and there were 2 piles of plain ground meat on top, with no sauce. I've been to Italy and what this place served me was not Spaghetti Bolognese, glad I didn't ask for pizza. The beer was quite nice though, called Loburg.

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As I had about 5 hours to kill and 3 had been taken up in the center, I returned to the airport for the flight. This airport is about the same size as the one in Tangier, Morocco but more modern. There I had to check in and this French chick was unable to handle that an American could live in England and my old passport (which I always carry with me) had a stamp saying so. Her supervisor came over and said of course it's okay.

It was a relief to board the Easyjet plane and I landed at London's Gatwick Airport, grabbed a train and went home. It took 4 hours after getting on the plane when I stood in my bedroom said, "Hello bed, it's me". I slept about 10 hours. The next day I went to my bank and got that side of things sorted out, they said it was good for the next 4 years. I hope that's true because the woman I spoke to had that look of hatred for Americans in her eyes.

I've booked a flight to Naples from Madrid on the 30th of September, so will book a flight to Madrid on the 29th, stay there and go to the airport again, this is due to the flight times difference. Otherwise I'd do it in one go and not enter Spain.



I've had better days.
 
Aug 07, 2026

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