Return to Andorra

So, as I promised, I will continue to tell the stories about my last few days of my France and Spain trip back in April.  You will recall that I left off with my adventures on Thursday, April 16, 2009.  Moving on to:

Friday, April 17, 2009

Today, when Nick and I woke up, it was still pretty overcast.  It cleared up as we packed up our stuff and checked out.  We weren’t sure whether we should do a token final climb before we left Siurana, but we were actually pretty ready to go and anxious to get back to Andorra early enough to have some more time to look around.  So we headed out along the carsickness-inducing roads.

The first hour of driving out of Siurana was by far the worst, in terms of feeling like I was going to puke, so Nick and I stopped several times.  First we stopped to take a photo of some of the scenery.

Eventually, the roads started to straighten out, but I still felt pretty bad so we stopped in the center of a town to look around.  One of the guys who was sitting in the center plaza came up to talk to us.  He was intrigued because I was wearing shorts and he thought it was so cold.  (It actually was probably only about 60F but I was determined to wear my shorts anyways.)  So he had to come see where we were from.  He was more interested in Nick’s story because I guess he had spent some time working in England.  Meanwhile I took some photos of the chapel and the plaza.

After that, we finally got the radio working again.  Nick’s housemate had come through and texted us the radio code we needed to get it working again (and Nick promptly wrote it on the back of the removable radio piece so that he would never be without it again).  It took us a while to actually successfully enter it because I had made a few incorrect guesses based on what I remembered, which apparently was a bad idea because for every incorrect guess, the amount of time before you can enter your next guess increases.  So I was worried we would need to have like a week of no entering – but we eventually were able to successfully enter what we needed to.  Nick was thrilled to have the radio back (because when we hadn’t had it, I had just put on my iPod headphones and sung out loud what I was hearing).

Then I took a nap, because I still felt kind of carsick.  When I woke up, we were probably only about an hour from Andorra, and I felt much better.  We were driving through the flooded region that I had noticed on the way down to Siurana, too.

Soon after that, though, we were at the Andorra border, which we passed through quickly.

By this point, it was 2 or 3pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we went to a giant sells-everything store right after we crossed the border top pick up food to make lunch with.  Because of Andorra’s history as a tax-haven, even though it was similar to a Carrefour hypermarket in style, there was a heavy emphasis there on alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, and jewelry.  Nick made a bee-line for the alcohol; I focused on the chocolate.  Eventually, besides some normal food supplies for breakfasts and lunches for the next few days, we ended up getting whisky for Nick and orange-infused Absolut vodka for me (it was like a large bottle for less than 10 euros – which is apparently extremely cheap).  We also got some chocolate and some candy, including a giant package of gummy worms.  Pretty good.

By the time we left the grocery store, it had actually started pouring rain.  We drove to the hotel (we were staying at the same hotel we had stayed at on the way down through Andorra; we figured that was our best bet because it was cheap and we knew where it was – on the way down, the GPS had gone haywire, and we didn’t want to drive all around Andorra trying to find a new hotel), checked in, and went up to our room.

We waited a little while for the rain to drop off, and ate (a very late) lunch.  Then we drove into Andorra la Vella to walk around and find a good place for dinner.  We wandered around for a little while to see our restaurant options (it had started to clear up by this point), and eventually picked a tapas place (since I had been whining that I wanted tapas).  Plus, because we had had a late lunch, we weren’t starved (Nick is generally skeptical of tapas because he’s worried he won’t get enough food).  It turned out to be really good – we sort of guessed at interpreting the menu, but did a good job and picked some really good stuff.  So that was good.

We went back to the hotel after dinner and opened some of the booze from the hypermarket.  Nick had whisky, and I made an interesting mixed drink out of the orange-infused vodka and cranberry juice.  It sounds weird, but it tasted just like Smarties (the American ones, not the English ones).  It also tasted really good with the gummy worms.

So that was our trek back up to Andorra!  Stay tuned for more – there’s still four more days of this trip to blog…