Sunday, April 12, 2009
Today was the big driving day of this part of our trip. We were driving 522 miles from Fontainebleau, France to Sant Julià de Lòria, Andorra. The drive was forecast to take about 8 and a half hours, and ended up being over ten, door-to-door (including lunch and gas stops).
When we woke up in Fontainebleau, it was sprinkling, but it stopped while we packed up the tent, ate breakfast, and checked out of the campground. Luckily, the fussy baby from the night before had packed up and gone to a gîte yesterday, so we slept better. As we were packing up, we ran into Goldie-from-Cambridge, who had apparently been there since Thursday, and was staying at our campsite. He was there with a few other Cambridge people, apparently, but Nick and I later tried to find their tent and failed. So we continued packing up, and checked out. We were on the road at 10:18, French-time.
So we drove and drove and drove, mostly along the expensive péages that take us to southern France. We were still radio-less, so I napped for a while, and then, while stuck in traffic, brought out the netbook and started drafting blog posts. It rained for quite a bit of the afternoon, so when we stopped to make lunch around 2:30 in the afternoon, we had to do it under the roof outside of the bathroom at a rest stop. That took about half an hour (we cooked hamburgers on the camping stove!), and then we were back in the car.
We still didn't have the radio working, so I spent a few hours reading car license plates out loud in French to practice my French numbers. When that finally got boring, I just put on my iPod (with my headphones in) and sung songs out loud to Nick when I could remember the words. That killed another few hours. Finally, we got to the base of the Pyrenees.
This is when we started to get nervous. Nick and I had decided that we probably didn't need chains on the car at this time of year, but we could see snow on top of some of the higher mountains, and we could also see several cars coming down with snow on their roofs. Uh oh. It had clearly been snowing in the Pyrenees while it had been raining in the rest of France. So even though the road was currently clear, we were worried about what it might turn into. But we started up anyway.
As we gained in altitude, we started seeing more and more snow on the side of the road, but the road itself was clear, and there was no black ice (and it was slightly above freezing). So we kept heading up, even as the precipitation started to get murkier and we ended up in fog and/or a cloud.
There were some real hairpin turns, and eventually we got to the Andorra border, where a cold-looking immigration officer just waved us through. Then we got to the tunnel that takes us through to the main part of Andorra. The tunnel was several miles long, but the good news was that when we emerged on the other side, the weather was significantly better because we were now officially on the south side of the Pyrenees. The temperature was back above freezing (it had dipped below), and there was less fog, cloud, and snow. We had made it!
We still had to find our hotel (Hotel Husa Imperial), though, which was way closer to the Spanish border of Andorra than the French one. Problematically, the GPS started to go really haywire, apparently because of reflections from the high mountains around us. It was convinced we were on different roads than we were, that we weren't on any roads at all, and that we were driving at over 250mph (it dinged at us when we did that). So the GPS was not helping us find the hotel. Meanwhile, the map that we had downloaded from the internet of where the hotel was turned out to be really wrong. Instead of being up a steep road out of town, it was right in the center of Sant Julià de Lòria, and we had driven right past it. Oops.
So finally, around 8:30pm, we found our hotel, checked in, and parked the car (for an extra 12 euros for the night). The hotel was pretty dead (it was Easter, after all), but we had a nice big room.
We eventually got ourselves psyched up to go walk around and look for dinner.
We found one other open place besides the hotel restaurant, so we went there. It was a small bar that served tapas and pizza -- we went for pizza, since we really couldn't understand what any of the tapas, besides the patates, were. So that was good.
From there we headed back to the hotel, took quite decent showers, and went to bed.
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