Ok, I was rough on Llanes. But we've liked a lot about almost everywhere we went (or we liked it more in retrospect) so surely we were due to have a place that disappointed. But leaving Llanes also meant leaving the water and the mountains as our last days in Spain were inland. So we enjoyed our last hours on the road out of Llanes, a last glimpse of the ocean. Alternately enveloped in clouds and fog and lit up with brilliant sunny valleys, it was an awfully pretty drive.
A cabdriver in Madrid told Ed that we should travel north because the food is better. This wasn't universally true but we did have some excellent meals at the end of our trip. San Sebastian took tapas to another level and its Old Town is just filled with bar after bar with all kinds of tapas. Fancy post-modern tapas on long sticks, old-school tortilla espaniola tapas, mayo-heavy seafood salad tapas, grilled meat tapas, pisto-style tapas, and of course the ubiquitous pepper tapas.
Our kids were the only ones in the water when we arrived at the beach the first morning. Probably because it was raining and while we dressed them in bathing suits we only figured we'd be wading. But the bay was warm (like bathwater warm) and they were wet within seconds anyway so what did it really matter. And they had a lot of fun--so much fun that other people began to drift down to do some swimming nearby. We lasted for a couple hours that day and then it turned into a serious downpour and it was time to leave. Still, that beach morning showed us just how great a week in San Sebastian could be (for when we win the lottery some day). Apparently the water is only warm enough to swim in from mid-June to early September but people still come in droves. Spanish royalty of the 19th century made San Sebastian (or Donostia in Basque) its summer retreat and you can see why with its protected beaches and clear water. 
To get from Cadaques to San Sebastian, we'd made some decisions, chiefly to get around the mountain ranges of northern Spain and southern France avoiding twisty roads that cause motion sickness. We could go north and then west via France or south and then northwest. Outside Figueres, the landscape has that could-have-been-on-a-canvas feel to it. Rolls of hay, fields of sunflowers--Toulouse is not so far... As much as we were tempted by the signs to Franca, we returned south to skirt the ranges on Spanish highways. 
We passed through Olite and I think I was the only one who wanted to stop before we hit San Sebastian. But 3+ hours, 12+ towers, 1000+ steps up/down all those towers, 200+ photos, and 360 degrees of terrific views later we were all believers. What a fantastic Gothic castle--royal seat of Charles III of Navarre?--fully described by its English-language map/guide (lost in my luggage or this post would be much longer). The castle/palace is in such amazing shape that you can really imagine the jousting events, the exotic birds, etc. Plus we found yet another stork nest, a great parador for lunch, and an easy return to the highway. If we weren't so interested in San Sebastian I suspect we'd have stayed longer as Olite is the wine capital of Navarre!
When Ed and I went to Sicily years ago, we had this running gag of all the things we'd read or been told that were dead-wrong. One of them was "balmy Agrigento" which turned out to be frigidly cold in April. So Ed will often say "balmy Agrigento" when someone is feeding us a line. Well, no one told us that Zaragoza would be pleasantly warm, but it was in a word dead-hot. So hot in fact that the statues have to sit down and have a drink. Zaragoza started out as a bad joke because naughty Jane (our gps) led us to a private parking garage but the driveway we'd turned into led us only to a pedestrian plaza... Which Ed ultimately drove along--between cafe tables and around confused commuters--until we came to a side street. We finally found the hotel and parking and headed off to see the cathedral--it seemed important at the time with its dozens of cupolas of brightly painted ceramic tiles. The fountains were unusual too and the sight of water seemed to make us a little cooler. But somehow this was yet another city where eating was challenging. Every place recommended was closed or moved away; one had been in existence for over 100 years but it was literally torn down just that week. We did see some funny things in Zaragoza--the fancy hat shop was my personal favorite. It's not like Zaragoza isn't lovely but where on earth are these hats worn? The night ended badly--bad food, obnoxious service, worn-out kids from all the wandering around looking for an open restaurant. And when we finally got back to our hotel and to bed, the airconditioner was malfunctioning. So Ed decided to compound his driving crime with a little damage to property and snapped the ventilation arms one by one to allow a little more air in the room. Needless to say, we were quick to leave in the morning to seek comfort in our cool Passat.
Dali's museum is so surprising that there aren't really words to describe it. The terraces and open spaces are filled with large sculpture (car wreck, weird mannequins doing "YMCA" as Ed joked, etc.) His most famous work, Persistence of Memory and its melting clocks, is in MoMA http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79018
Perhaps it was the smaller Statue of Liberty with two torches (?) or Dali or the hotel pool that seemed to bring boys of all nationalities together in a splashing, ball-tossing fest. Or the fact that pebble beaches make for better stone-skipping than for laying about or making sandcastles. But we got downright silly in Cadaques. I lost the photo of Nate in his Karate Kid pose in my upload but the boys had a lot of fun, including a little vogue-ing in Mom's sunglasses in the beach bar. Nice how my glass of wine fits so neatly under Nate's face. 
On the first night in town, we forgot our camera. And there was a sunset and a night sky that inspired me to claim that Cadaques was THE prettiest place on earth. Big talk, particularly because I'm pretty sure Ed and I had split a bottle of wine. Still, it was beautiful. And I spent the next couple of days and nights trying to capture its light, color, etc. Unsuccessfully as you can see but there's a hint of it here. Better to leave it to the artists and real photographers.
Not really, but now that I've descended into pathetic puns for my post titles, it's clearly time to wrap up the blog...
