The best train ride ever

I'm sure that's not really true. It wasn't even a nice train, and it was all rattle-y and stopped about every three minutes and kept blowing its horn really loudly. But it was beautiful. Heading east, mostly through the mountains following a little river and sometimes cutting north to the coast. They call the north coast of Spain the costa verde (green coast) and it is so pretty. I won't bore you with ramble-y landscape descriptions, but I'm a sucker for ocean and mountains together and, if not the best ever, it was the best train ride I've ever been on.

The train stopped in Santander, the last stop on this leg of wandering around Iberia. On Sunday I'm back to Barcelona and then off to start the Camino de Santiago. All I really wanted to do today was walk on the beach, but it rained. Again. I think I've seen more rain in the past three days than I had in the previous three months. So I went to the art museum. Free museums are so great.

I'm not sick of art museums yet, but I don't always have much left to say about them. But this one did have this weird abstract piece, this amorphous sculpture (I think it was called The Blob) with a face projected onto it, repeating a very muffled monologue. But it wasn't really a face because it had no nose and the eyes slanted up at 45-degree angles. It was strange looking. The fun part was that almost the whole time I was there, the museum employees were laughing uncontrollably at it. Nice change from the typical stern, bored, frowning museum guards.