>Day 7 Caught in a Blizzard in the Pyrenees; April 7, 2009

>Hallelujah, an English keyboard!
Tonight Dad and I are in a cheap but safe hotel in the bowels of Barcelona, Spain. It´s a great location, only a block off Las Ramblas, the main tourist drag thru the old section of Barcelona and near 2 Metro stops. There are lots of little Tapas bars around to eat and a fresh fruit and vegetable market a block away. The room is only 9´X 9´X 9´feet tall but it has a private bath and it´s only 60€ a night, which is great for the most expensive city in Spain, and right downtown.
All the buildings seem to be 6 stories high, which is about as high as I think you used to could go, because you did not have reinforced steel beams in the old days.
Barcelona is noted for pickpockets and thieves, but any robber would have to go through the desk downstairs and come up 2 stories, so I feel safe where we are.
The car, however, is another matter. It´s parked in a pay lot half a block away. I hope it is all right. We brought the GPS in with us, of course, and left nothing visible! Guess what, the worse news is that it will cost us 30 € per DAY for parking (about $40 a day) and the car will be there at least 2 days! Oh my heck, everything I saved on this hotel (found it on Lonely Planet guidebook) I am spending in parking!
Today it rained all day, except when it snowed. (Notice the weather in the pix.) We drove 9 hours to get here, through the rain and snow, because we wanted to take the scenic route OVER the Pyrenees instead of the fast way. (The craggy mountains in the picture are heading up into the Pyrenees from the French side.) The fast way would have been 3 easy hours on the autobahn and just zip over to the Mediterranean coast and then down to Barcelona.
We, on the other hand, wanted to see Andorra. We saw it, and we never will see it again.
It´s basically only got one town, and the whole country is built in a narrow pass through the Pyrenees. The entire country is nothing but clinging to the side of steep gorges. In the one town, Andorra-la-Velle, there are lots of rich-looking apartments like a ski town and several stores selling ski stuff, all crammed into the sides of the gorge. You´d think it would be picturesque, but someone made a design decision that says all buildings need to look like they are made of slate or dark rock, and the roofs are black. Therefore, the whole place is dismal and looks like a Harry Potter ski resort! There are several ski resorts in Andorra, but we could not see where it could open up wide enough to ski. It´s all straight up and down.
The reason we kept seeing cars coming down with skis on them is because IT´S APRIL AND SKIING IS STILL OPEN. The snow was blowing and Larry held on tight as he drove around snow-covered switchbacks. Some peoples’ cars would not pull the grade, so they were walking down on the narrow 2 lane road, (not looking happy) some cars slid off the road, and we thought this is for sure, the first, last, and only time we will EVER come to Andorra!
About that time we found a tunnel that would cut off a lot of switchbacks, so we took it. Today we probably paid $50 in tolls to go through tunnels that are shorter than going for free the long way!
We also went through Llivia, which neither of us had ever heard of. I just looked it up and the site was in Spanish, but I think it says Livia is an enclave of Spain that is totally surrounded by France. Huh? Llivia is lovely, however, and we liked it.
The Pyrenees are big steep mountains made of dark granite. The French side was not nearly as pictureque as German mountains, mainly because the towns aren´t as perfect. the tops were covered in clouds or snow, so we could not see them. The Spanish side had a very lovely 50-mile scenic drive along the base of the southern edge of the mountains. I kept wishing the sky would clear so we could see the tops of the mountains, which were way up there.
We followed our GPS right to the hotel door, out of the castle of Carcassonne where we stayed in France, down through the mountains and switching freeways and into the bowels of Barcelona. I will never leave home without it again! I love the GPS. If you buy one, get one that does Europe, of course!