9-26 El Bote Tour

 My injured foot is feeling all the walking I have been doing.  So today we decided to do a boat tour.  I found one titled "Bilbao Estuary and Abra Bay Boat Tour" put on by a company called El Bote Tours.  Now, when you look at the photos you may think it should be called something else - like "Industrial shipping and cranes".  

I took a photo of this pedestrian

on bridge from the other side when we went to the Guggenheim museum.

Still trying to figure out what these figures represent.  They are definitely female - so I'm thinking slaves.

Then past the Guggenheim museum.

And now we start with the cranes.  Our boat tour started at 1:15pm so the light is still harsh.

We saw a lot of abandoned buildings along the river - mostly on the left side as we left Bilbao.

I looked for color and reflections.

We are traveling towards Getxo - where we drove to yesterday.

And there is the famous bridge - the one we never made it too.  There is an elevator that takes pedestrians from the ground level up to the top level.  You walk across the bridge and then take another elevator down to the ground.  Meanwhile there is another way for cars, walkers and bikers to get across at ground level.

The white car with the windows, hangs from the ropes - It moves across the river like a cable car - transporting people, cars, and bikers across to the other side.

Our tourist boat stopped at 4-5 different docks - where no one got off and no one got on.  We summarized that there was a timetable for when we were supposed to reach certain ports and if we were too early - we needed to stop and wait our turn.

A closeup of the "cable car" You can see the bikers and walkers - there actually was a car or two on board as well.

There was a lot of art along the walkway along the river.  

And of-course the cruise ship we saw yesterday.

This is as close as we got to the mouth of the river as it dumped into the ocean.

All dock ways looked like this.  Our stop did have steps - it was still hard to get off and on.  Hay I'm old!

Proof we stopped at Getxo.

On the way back - we saw the cable car in the middle of the river.

One of the spider like things we saw placed along the docks.

Look at the far left crane to see how they were put to use.  Behind the barriers are piles of scrap metal.

Pretty grasses.  We are on our way back.

The soccer stadium.

The same building we took photos of yesterday.

And just past the Guggenheim - we are back at our dock.  Michael had ordered an Uber to pick us up at 4:15 - he was early.  So we were able to leave our boat tour and walk back to the same spot we were dropped off and immediately grab our uber back home.  We have noticed that all of our Ubers have been black Toyotas with the uber logo on the side of the cars. Bilbao - or maybe the Basque country seems to have its own rules.