Andorra

What do you do when you've got a few more days before you leave to Italy, and you're looking for a change of scenery from your current location (Girona)? You go for the little tiny international boundary called Andorra, famous for hiking, skiing, and smuggling. To get there you're presented with a really nice drive through the Pyrenees mountains, keeping in mind that the road has lots of hidden corners to dodge death wish motorcyclists that lean a bike over while passing a bus and just assume that you won't touch them. As you arrive in Andorra, its basically one long valley with steep mountains on each side of it. With such an attractive place to put a town, it is too bad they concreted the hell out of it, and put up a million shops, with duty free, tax free signs everywhere. Cigarettes, booze, gasoline, it's all cheaper there. Needless to say, you have to get out of town and up in the hills. For any hiking book it is common to rate the difficulty of trails. If that hiking book is published by a country that knows only mountains, and to get anywhere you need to go up and over them... be warned what is classified as an easy hike. And bring a helicopter and set of ropes if you plan to tackle something difficult. For our easy hike we went up for about 2 hours above the tree line but it was worth it.


This was our 6 month anniversary hike. You'd think we lived in the southern hemisphere. Married on a beach in December. Hiking snow capped mountains in June. But hey, we are the gongshow.