Day Eleven

France: Carcassonne; Alet les Bain;
Andorra: Pal


Tuesday 15th July 2008


We awoke early, somewhat bleary eyed after a peaceful night ‘boon docking’ in Carcassonne and headed off to the hypermarket. Now for those fellow Francophiles you’ll know what I mean when I say we spent 2 hours wandering the isles of Geant, we left with our trolley loaded up with all sorts of gastronomical delights.

We headed back to our base in Alet les Bain via a Toyota dealership to enquire about a replacement wing mirror glass for Priscilla (to no avail) planning the next destination along the way.

We lunched in Alet les Bain packing up and heading off onto the open road again on route to the principality of Andorra, our next stop. The journey was an adventure in itself. Maureen (our renamed sat nav) decided to play a little trick on Priscilla and routed her up an unpaved single dirt track! Still listed as a D road, 5 minutes into the deepest countryside and I got cold turkey and decided that this donkey track couldn’t possibly take us over the looming mountain and somehow managed a turnaround in an open field. This really tested Priscilla’s resilience as she bumped her way along the dirt track, shredding my nerves but Priscilla took it all in her stride.

As we passed back through the hamlet on our return from the donkey track we understood why the old man brushing straw off the road had stared so strangely at us on our first pass through. We must have been the only foreigners he’d seen this decade! Having sorted out the squabbles between Maureen (our sat nav) and Priscilla (Maureen was subjected to her 1st verbal warning) we were back onto a D road (this time with tarmac) and proceed to wind our way through stunning countryside as we journeyed deeper up into the Pyrenees.

As we drove on the gradients where getting steeper and the views more and more dramatic, Pricilla bounded along as though she had been made for the Mountains and continued to be a real pleasure to drive. We stopped briefly to be amazed at a lengthy aerobatic display of an eagle swooping through the thermals above a grassy meadow at the side of the road.

Arriving at the border of France and Andorra, snow capped mountains above us we motored on cutting directly through the heart of the border mountains via a road tunnel. We had to stop as we exited the other side not only to look back on the stunning mountain view that we had tunneled through, but also to check that we hadn’t entered into Narnia!

Andorra definitely feels like another country, the architectural style of the buildings, and the price of diesel (only 1.1 euros V 1.4 in France) even the road signage being different.

We headed on through the valleys, Andorra’s development is narrow and ribbon like with every available bit of building space in the main valley being chopped into for real estate. A tax free haven, the volume of new construction was quite amazing. The local building materials being a combination of the local stones so lots of dark granites, it’s a little over bearing at first but as you head out of the main urban areas the vistas open up and we were treated to stunning mountain scenery.

We arrived at our final destination camping Xixerella in the Vallnord of Andorra. A lush green open plan site with free find pitches, loads of space, heated shower block and swimming pool. Surrounded by steep mountains, granite crags, pine forests and a bubbling crystal clear stream at the side of our pitch, we were in tree hugger paradise!

We were now becoming experts at pitching our mobile home, within an hour we had wine in hand and were relaxing discussing the merits of living in such a picturesque landscape. Again J rustled us up another splendid supper as the sun set behind the mountains; life doesn’t get much better than this.