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COPYRIGHT 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Thomas Swick
SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain _ Only by first suffering despair can you truly know joy, and only in travel can you experience the two in the space of an hour.
I arrived in San Sebastian without a reservation on a Friday in August. There are worse times to arrive in the Basque city without a reservation _ during the film festival, during Semana Grande. That's about it.
You'd think after all these years I'd know better. But I hadn't planned on being in San Sebastian for the weekend; I had planned to be in Bilbao. And I had been in Bilbao, where I quickly learned it was THEIR Semana Grande. Every pension had a little COMPLETO taped next to its name on the dusty intercom.
Yes, I should have made a reservation for Bilbao. But rooms, I always feel, are like parking spaces _ one will always turn up. (It's easier to travel alone with this philosophy. Or perhaps this philosophy is the reason I travel alone.) In any case, I returned to the bustling bus station and bought a ticket for San Sebastian.
The tourist information office was like a bakery the day before Easter (probably another good time to have reservations in San Sebastian) except that many of the people taking numbers were hunched by backpacks. When my number was called, I spoke with a harried young woman who opened a map and circled with her pen the only hotel that still had rooms. It looked to be in a valley halfway to Tolosa. She said I would have to take a bus.
I walked out thinking: That can't be true. I rolled my suitcase across the patterned sidewalks, the vibration of the wheels over the inlaid stones creating an annoying, persistent hum. Just arrived and already making a nuisance of myself.
It was...
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