Our view upon landing... I

know,

right?!

Because we can. That is basically why we went (that and the goal of one particular friend to set foot in every, single - no matter how tiny - country on our little planet of Earth). So we did.

For those who do not regularly watch Jeopardy, read

The Onion

, or are bad at geography, Andorra is a tiny little country tucked away in the mountains between France and Spain. A ski destination for many a European. A shopping destination for others.

As it happens, Andorra at times resembles one giant Duty Free store. Luxury goods, over-sized chocolate, sunglasses, perfume and beauty products of all kind can be found here - one might easily be confused that they had stumbled not into an independent country, but one gynormous airport terminal. Lots of shopping and all tax free. (

You must understand how I was pained to discover that even without tax, the gold ring I had my eye on was still, shall we say, out of my pay range. Alas, there probably wouldn't have been room for it in my Ryanair hand-luggage anyway... *sigh*

)

Um, just a little bit gorgeous. Just a little.

But luckily this trip was not tainted by my shopping hopes deferred. And this is due, in large part, to the Mountains. They put on a GREAT show. Real Mountains. Big Mountains. And the Mountains were very much - as put by a good friend of mine who travelled to Austria with my many years ago - "in your face". I felt like I'd seen the love of my life again after a long (loooooong) time apart. MOUNTAINS!

Andorra La Vella. You guessed it. The capital city

Andorra, not without its Culture. A little bit of Dali by night.

And so we did what any self-respecting American, Mountain lovers would do. We climbed them.

Well, we hiked a bit. And we scaled a rather dangerously steep hill which appeared to have played host to many a rock-slide (see below). A few times I feared we would A) start another rock slide or, (possibly worse) B) die.

Rocks. Brings out the inner mountain goat.

Luckily, neither happened. What happened instead was that our flight home was DELAYED 3 1/2 HOURS, which resulted in a rather intense and competitive game of Spades - which nearly proved as fatal and detrimental to everyone's health. But we survived, made it (barely) back to London in one piece, in the wee hours of Monday morning, with a game of spades still to finish...

We are happy, jovial even. This photo was taken pre-Spades intensity. Obvs.