If you are reading this, you have probably been waiting in anticipation to find out if I made a successful visit to the castle. If you are unfamiliar with what happened on my first attempt at visiting this castle, please click here to find out about the necessity of a second visit. The good news is that I made it to the castle. The better news is that I managed to do it without getting arrested or killed. Normally, I try to avoid anything excessively dangerous or things that could land me in potential legal trouble, but I was determined to make it to the castle before the weather turned bad.
Still doubting the legality of walking along the shoulder of the highway, I posed the question to my friends before embarking on this adventure. The response I received was that as long as there were no signs explicitly prohibiting walking the on the shoulder, it was not illegal. This isn't to say that it is legal, but at least I probably wouldn't be arrested if I were to attempt it. On the chance that I did get stopped by a law enforcement officer, I planned this excursion for the day my foreigner card expired, so that if I did get arrested, I was still in the country. In fact, I was so preoccupied about getting arrested that not only did I plan this trip around the expiration date of my card, I also took with me my passport and official, stamped application that showed I had applied to renew my identification card a month prior. On a side note, I am still waiting for the government to process my renewal paperwork, a process I began now two months ago, which will be a subject for another post.
After the now familiar, train, metro, bus trip, I found myself facing a sign that pointed me in the right direction. I started down the highway in the direction indicated by the sign. As always, click on the picture to see a larger version.
I was so excited when I finally arrived at the castle that I started taking pictures of everything. The castle was smaller than I had expected, but that made it more beautiful.
I spent a couple of hours at the castle and felt the visitwas completely worth my while, and did not regret making the trek along the highway to get there, until I saw some of the local wildlife. As you know from my previous post, I do not have a soft spot in my heart for spiders. What I didn't tell you was that also near top of my list of my least favorite animals are caterpillars. During my time at the exploring the castle grounds, I saw some of the biggest spiders and caterpillars that I had ever seen in the wild. On several occasions I had to move to a new place to eat my lunch because I was sitting too close to a spider web. I knew my time at the castle was complete when, while sitting under a tree, I heard a loud plop and thought it was just an acorn. Until it moved. I realized the "plop" was a huge caterpillar that had fallen from one of the trees. Terrified that one would land on my head, I packed up the rest of my belongings and left as quickly as I could. The least frightening of the animals were the lizards, as they usually scurried away from me before I could get a decent picture of them. However, sometimes they would dart away before I could even see them, having me convinced with the rustling of the leaves that some particularly menacing creature (a spider) was going jump out of the foliage and attack me.
On the way to the castle, I noticed the following sign, and considered following the hiking trail back to the bus stop during the return journey if there was time. I stopped at the signs again on the return trip, and remembering what happened the last time I tried to follow this trail (in the opposite direction), I decided that if I actually wanted to catch the return bus and not encounter any more wildlife that I should stick to the highway.
Basque words of the day:
Armiarma - spider
Beldar - caterpillar
Gaztelu - castle
