Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Andorra Part 1...

So of course there is a big mess going on right now with the European transportation system... of course. So basically I missed my connecting train from Toulouse to l'Hopitalet Prés Andorre, which meant taking a later train. So I finally got as close to Andorra as I possibly could without a car, but it was so late at night the buses had stopped running, and the taxi's wouldn't go out to there. I tried getting a room at the only hotel in town, but the owner told me it was closed, shut the door on me and turned off the light... oh how nice the French can be sometimes. Being the practical person I am though, I made it to the first city in Andorra later that night, and got a room at a hotel. Not my hotel since that was still further away, but at least I was safe and sound. 

Playing around with long exposure rates on the long train ride. 

Basically how it has looked for the past two days on the chair lifts to the top of the mountain. Clouds are something you don't have to deal with when skiing in Minnesota. They also make everything look flat even through the orange goggles, so when skiing you can't see any bumps on the slope.

An all too frequent sight when starting from the top of the mountain. Can't say how many times I have had to just stop because I can't see the ground I am skiing on, let alone the markers to the pistes.

Taking some time to dry off. The temperatures stay above freezing, so the snow melts right away getting you very wet, very quickly.

Of course, the weather is much better when you get below the tree line. 

Trying to leave the mountain on the gondola...

Which of course stopped for 2 and a half hours, just my luck. Also my luck was the fact that my car stopped in the half way station, so I wasn't dangling at some absurd height above rocky ground. At least I could see the people frantically running around trying to fix whatever was wrong. Once at the bottom, the workers told me they would contact me in the next few days to hopefully send me money for this incident. Not that I minded too much since I have no real plans here. Time not really wasted. 

No comments:

Post a Comment