Andorra and Siurana

I typed this back while in Siurana...

It isn't raining in Siurana at the moment, but after thunder and hailstorms throughout the day, everything is drenched. We've played about a million card games this afternoon. But this post is about...

Monday, April 13, 2009

We woke up relatively early in the hotel, but it wasn't quite as early as we thought at the time, because I forgot that my phone was on English rather than Andorran time. Nevertheless, we were checked out of the hotel by about 10:45 Andorra time, having already eaten breakfast (leftover croissants and pain au chocolats from Fontainebleau). At one point during breakfast, Nick and I were talking about internet privacy, and how the second your Facebook status switches to "engaged," Facebook starts giving you a million wedding-based ads. Nick said, "Never send me an email with the word "engagement" in it -- Gmail already thinks I'm trying to get into Harvard for law school!" Which makes Nick very stroppy.

So then we drove into Andorra la Vella to take a look around Andorra's capital city before we continued on down south to Siurana. It was nice in some ways, but in some ways it kind of reminded us of one big duty-free shop. There were also a surprising number of Pilates studios.





















From there, we headed back to our car to do the approximately three-and-a-half hour drive to Siurana. Finding our car was a bit cruxy because there were about five identical-looking parking garages right next to each other, but we got it eventually. So off we went!

Most of the drive to Siurana was uneventful, although we came across some interesting-looking cloud formations.





We also went past a completely flooded plain that I failed to take a picture of. It stretched on for quite a while (the highway was well above it). That was interesting.

Just when I started to get worried that we weren't going to a real climbing area because we were still in a completely flat, rockless area with only like 30 miles left to drive, we suddenly started to go around sharp curves and began to see some real cliffs. I had to tell Nick to slow himself down when he claimed that he was "taking the racing line."



Finally, we got to an extremely curvy section of road. I felt so carsick. And I wasn't sure whether the car was going to make it, either. I also got worried that the campground wasn't even going to exist because the terrain was so suddenly steep. We eventually finally pulled into the campsite and checked in, and then drove around to find a little spot for our tent. There were a lot of little tiers (not too dramatic) and we got a spot on one of them, and set up. I was in charge of the tent poles.

I also was in charge of picking up the guidebook, which was interesting. The campground sold it, but the lady explained to me that the guidebook was about 8 years old and a lot of new routes had been put up since then, so the campground owned a copy with the new routes penciled in that we could borrow and copy when we had time. So that was relatively useful. We didn't copy any routes today but decided we would tomorrow.

After eating a late (like 4pm lunch), we went off to do a token climb for the day at Ca L'Isabel, which was a very short walk from the campsite. The climb itself wasn't too bad (a 6a with a low crux), but the setting was very exposed since it was basically on a cliff that was high above the valley floor. After that, we gathered our stuff up, looked around at the other nearby crags briefly, and headed back to the campsite to cook dinner.

The good news was that the camping stoves were working significantly better than they had been in Fontainebleau -- Nick claimed that all the curves on the drive had shaken them up so that they now worked well.



I also managed to take a shower, which was reasonably warm, and not a push-button.

After dinner, we went to bed fairly early, especially since, although it was warm in the sun during the day, the air itself was cold and getting rapidly colder after sunset. Nick was a little worried about what we would climb for the rest of our time in Siurana, since a lot of the areas had more 7s and 8s than 6s, but we picked a few likely crags to visit tomorrow, and went to sleep.