Road trip! … to Andorra. Nope, not Tabitha’s grandmother on Bewitched (that’s Endora), but to the 17th smallest country in the world, sandwiched between Spain and France at an elevation of 3,356 feet in the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees extend for a length of about 305 miles to the Mediterranean.
You won’t believe this: the entire journey from hotel door to hotel door today was 122 miles. Easy trip, we thought, probably 2.5-3 hours with a stop for coffee and gas. Well, we left at 9:00 am and got into Andorra La Vella at 3:00 pm sharp! Six hours were eaten up by mountain roads, slow-moving traffic ahead of us, a 30-minute complete stop due to a crash up ahead, and an hour or more of creeping along as we went through immigration at the Spain-Andorra border. The border surprise? We drove right through…even though the immigration booths were staffed, nobody stopped us. We believe they were doing random stops. But traffic was slow once we entered Andorra, all the way to the center of the city.
We wouldn’t change a thing if we had to do it over, as driving through the Pyrenees was spectacular. We drove through numerous villages on a curvy, winding two-lane road. In some, there were Saturday markets, with stands overflowing with fruit and vegetables, and people everywhere. We passed lots of old stone farmhouses, still being used and cared for, and a million trees. It was glorious. The first two photos are from our first stop, as we spied this unusual bridge driving through the town of St. Joan de les Abedesses. We have never seen a bridge with a large central arch with two smaller arched “windows” on either side of the main arch. The trees obscure the right side of the bridge, but it is identical to the left. All of the other photos were taken along the way to give you an idea of what a road through the Pyrenees looks like. The last photo looked like the house was built just over the edge of a cliff! We found it very similar to driving through the Alps and the Rockies. A great day!
