Day 10 - Nimes

Day 10—Tuesday, May 19, 1992

We were up at the usual time, showered, and checked out of the hotel. While Sharon waited in the car, I went into the Cite to buy a brass cat figurine I’d seen the evening before. I ended up having to wait around for fifteen minutes until the store opened, and then I bought the cat.

Today’s itinerary called for going into Andorra and Spain, and if time permitted us to do so, we also wanted to visit a monastery called St. Martin and a castle ruin called Peyrepertuse. We hit the road and stopped for a couple of cups of coffee, groceries, and gas at a little shopping center near the town of Quillan. Soon after leaving Quillan, we started up into the Pyrenees. The road twisted and turned going up and up, then it straightened out and flattened for a spell through a lovely valley. Next it narrowed and twisted wildly downhill to the town of Az-les-Thermes. After that it widened, soon started up again, and then took off for the sky. The road at this point, nearing the Andorran border, was in very good shape with guard rails, but still I could have done without the rain, and hail! By the time we got to the border, the altitude was beginning to affect us both, making me a little lightheaded and Sharon a bit nauseous. We stopped at the border crossing to get our passports stamped (Andorra has the world’s biggest passport stamp). Then we drove on, and that meant we continued to drive up, until the road finally crested at about 7800 feet. It was good to start down again.

Andorra started off like a giant ski resort and went down hill from there. We stopped in the town of Encamp, I believe, and walked around. Everything was closed for the Andorran three-hour lunch. So we returned to the car and ate some of the bread and Camembert Cheese we’d bought in Quillan and then got back on the road. Before long we found ourselves in a huge traffic jam in a huge shopping center that tried to pass itself off as a town. It was the shopping center Sant Julia and it went on and on until we reached the Spanish border. Then we left Andorra without having met a single Andorran (they looked Spanish) or without having bought a thing (they took both francs and pesetas).

The Spanish border guard asked me to open the trunk, which I did, but then he didn’t have any interest in looking inside. We asked where we could get our passport stamped, and he mentioned something about the police. We drove on. Our first impression of Spain was that it was under construction, road construction to be more precise. Soon, however, we were in the open country, flanked by the Pyrenees and beautiful countryside. We pulled over once to take some pictures, but mostly we just drove and admired what we saw out of the windshield. By 4:00 p.m. or so we were back in France. We stopped at the border, where Sharon found someone to enter a Spanish stamp in our passports, and then we stopped at the French border town of Bourg-Madame and walked around. It wasn’t much of a town, so we moved on.

Before long the road began to descend, winding back and forth, down and down. By this point I was used to it and took the hairpin turns at a pretty good clip, for hairpin turns. Near the end of this long descent, we came upon a fortress city that resembled a mini-Carcassonne. We checked it out, stopping for a cup of coffee on the way out. Sharon took the wheel and drove to the outskirts of Perpignan and then got on the autoroute, our first time on it.

Being a passenger was relaxing, but the day’s long drive, and the cold and rain, and the high altitude had taken its toll on me. My cold had returned after I had almost gotten over it the day before. I’m pretty sure it got a hold of me somewhere in Andorra.

The autoroute started off very nice indeed, what with castles off in the distance, the Mediterranean to our right, and the best rest stops I’d ever encountered. In the waning hours of daylight we stopped at one of the rest stops to partake of bread and cheese and wine. For awhile I started to feel better, even though it was quite cold and damp at this deserted rest stop. After our evening repast, we continued on the autoroute toward Montpellier. Evening came and shortly thereafter so too did the rain. Heavy rain. Blinding rain. Sharon had me take over the driving. There weren’t many cars still out on the road, but damn if there weren’t a lot of trucks, and every time we went to pass one it was like driving through a car wash. We drove by Montpellier and headed on toward Nimes.

My stamina was wearing very thin. We pulled off an exit outside Nimes in hopes of finding a hotel. We drove several miles, but all we found was a huge industrial complex. We got back on the autoroute and got off at the first Nimes exit. We started off making a wrong turn away from the hotels, doubled back, and found ourselves in hotel city near a modern stadium. We had to check out every last one of the six or so hotels in this part of town before we found one with a vacancy, which of course was the last one. That happened to be a Hotel Ibis. Our room was cramped and lacking charm, but it had a bed and a television. I flipped on the television, poured a glass of wine, and promptly fell asleep, by which time Sharon had already been asleep for ten minutes.

HIGHLIGHT: This day was not one to write home about, but driving through the Pyrenees is probably something I won’t soon forget, and dinner was rather enchanting as were various sections of our drive, particularly through parts of Spain.

LOWLIGHT: Andorra, the return of my cold, driving in the torrential rain on the autoroute, and going from hotel to hotel only to find out that there were no vacancies were all either disappointing, frustrating, or both. Hardest to take of all, however, is what we could have done on this day as opposed to what we did. Oh, well, Rick Steves warned us about Andorra.

REFLECTIONS FROM 2020:

Lost days are the bane of traveling. That is a day when nothing seems to click, and as a result, what might have been is missed, quite possibly forever. This day was a lost day. There was so much to see in this part France that we never saw, such as the Abbaye Saint-Martin-du-Canigou, which is a stunning abbey perched atop the Pyrenees that we practically drove by. Part of the problem was how many miles we drove this day, 333 in all. And even the highlights of the day are lost in the sense that I either don’t recall much about them anymore or else I’m not able to locate where we were since I didn’t make a record of it at the time—such as the “fortress city that resembled a mini-Carcassonne.” I’d like to know where it was but have no idea. And which rest stop was it where we ate dinner. Same thing.