Santander

When I worked for PwC, one of my last clients was the US arm of a Spanish bank. They started in 1857 in a town off the northern coast of Spain, Santander. They've since moved their headquarters to Madrid, but a part of me has always (well, for the last 10 years that I've known about them) wanted to visit the area where they started. We never could quite figure out a business purpose for me to fly over from Texas, though my boss always told me that if I could, he wanted it to be there while encierro in Pamplona is taking place and he would run with the bulls. Some day, I'm going to call his bluff on this one.

Fast forward to planning of this vacation and I very early on put Santander on the list of places to visit. It also helped that we needed a half way point between Porto and Bordeaux to break up the drive, and though it's not exactly a straight line, it does take it from 9 1/2 hours of driving to 6 and 4 1/2 hours so I thought it was worth the detour.

We got in around dinner time and enjoyed walking around the town during the evening.

We even found the original bank building!

It's me in the red shirt in front of the building

The panorama function on the iPhone doesn't work well with moving buses

It's covered in scaffolding. Sigh. Story of my travels.

The next morning we drove out to the Bay of Santander (which leads out to the Bay of Biscay). If you could go ahead and forward my mail to whatever address this is, I will spend the rest of my time here. What a view!!

We got out and walked along the beach for awhile because it's not a proper summer vacation if you don't get your toes sandy!

I think we now have a clear winner in the family vacation challenge.