I have a pictures in the gallery showcasing our first stop of the day, the massive Sagrada Familia cathedral. You can go up about 70-80m in the tower, but there are not many pictures from up there, as I was not in a terribly great state at the time (really, I felt quite close to the edge an awful lot of the time) . . . shades of Chichen-Itza in Mexico (yes, yes Taylor, we can all hear you).
We had driven in to Barcelona using the fastest route, which heads mostly East and then cuts South into Spain. This has the slight disadvantage that all of the roads used are toll highways. For the return trip, we decided to pass through Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees between Spain and France.
There was some disagreement as to the best direction to head out of Barcelona, and we were short an actual road map for Spain. This turned out well, however, in that our wrong turn ended us up in Montserrat, a great mountain view (see the pictures).
We continued to wend our way North West and finally found the highway up to Andorra. This stretch includes several tunnels, some a few kilometres long. You also are still in Catalonia, as we were reminded when we arrived just after the national police had cleared the roadway of a group of demonstrators (maybe 50 or so?) with big Catalonia flags. A few minutes later, we were two cars behind a car that hit a girl who was crying with her friends on the side of the road. It was time for us to get out of Spain.
Andorra is also part of what used to be Catalonia, and in fact the official language is Catalan, though a lot of Spanish is spoken in the South end, and a lot of French in the North end. They use Euros as currency, but are not an actual EU member, and as such are not subject to the same tax laws. As a result, Andorra has become a bit of a shopping mall (there are a few big ones on the side of the main road) and tourist destination for its cheap goods, including booze and perfume. We took advantage of this and grabbed some gazoil at about two-thirds the French price.
We were also hungry, and stopped in at a small village near the border. They were having a medieval festival that evening, and we bought cheese crepes at one of the little stalls while made-up soldiers marched around and performers wowed the many onlookers in the blocked off street. We realised on our way out of town, however, that there was a long drive ahead to Bordeaux, and so we grabbed some Burger King (go ahead, hate me, but I had a craving and it was fast and open).
The road out of Andorra and up through the French side of the Pyranees was dark, windy, and not very crowded. It is on this part of the trip that I really fell in love with our car. It had no trouble whipping around corners and keeping a decent speed as we drove off into the night. I didn't feel quite as confident as the locals that occasionally passed me, but following them made it feel more like a rally car race anyway.
Coming out of the mountains in France, we hit some dense fog and slow roads for about an hour, and still had hours to go until home. So Bri grabbed some sleep (he had to work in the morning), and I steered us back to Bordeaux for about 2am.
Posted by warcode at September 28, 2003 11:38 PM