Century Club!

Today is a super huge day in...probably only my family. Today I visited my 100th country and can become a member of the Traveler's Century Club!* AT, travel companion and my travel inspiration, is already a member and I am super excited to join this club that does nothing.**

To join this elite group, we drove from Barcelona to Andorra, a micro-state in the Pyrenees between Spain and France. Or, a two and a half hour drive into the mountains. Dad was a super trooper and drove us through the rain to get a point that he already had.*** 

We started out the day like this:

And arrived in Andorra like this:

We look the same, right? It wasn't that far, people. Calm down. 

Once in Andorra, we drove all of 15 minutes to the capital,**** Andorra la Vella. From there we did what every great traveler does upon arriving at a new country: we had lunch. 

To be real real about it and to give as much attention to a mundane detail as possible, we all had the chicken. We all agreed that it was quite good and surpassed all our expectations for Andorran chicken.*****

Oh, actually, there was a thing before lunch. We parked the car and I was ceremoniously presented with a banner celebrating 100 countries!! This family does not celebrate small and takes every opportunity to use my new fancy title.****** It was hysterical. I laugh-cried a little!

Following lunch, we took more banner pictures and took an obligatory "center of town with a church" picture. Many Andorrans were confused by us. 

The cold weather and lack of rainy day activities sealed the deal for us in Andorra and we loaded up the car to head back to Spain. We did make one stop, at the driver's request, however.*******

Oh, and, of course, we stopped twice on the way back to pull over on the side of the highway and take pictures next to signs commemorating our numbers of countries.********

Tomorrow we go to Mallorca********* for another point! It's all gravy from here!

-KT

*If you have not heard me talk about it, you can look it up here: http://travelerscenturyclub.org/

I encourage you to begin working through the three stages of learning about the TCC. Please keep in mind that, like grief, there is no required amount of time for each stage and you might not necessarily progress through to the final stage. It is perfectly acceptable to be stuck at stage one or two. 

The stages are:

1. Realize that a club for obnoxious uppity travelers really does exist. Everybody belongs somewhere, right?

2. Look at the country list and start to complain about how there are 325 on the list but only 193 according to the UN. Some of these are bogus! What the what?? Yeah, man, I totally get it but I didn't make the list, I'm just living in it. 

3. Start counting up your countries and planning how you can get more. 

**They are not totally the Seinfeld of clubs. They have a newsletter. There are chapters in various parts of the world that meet. 

***In TCC-speak, this is the ultimate definition of a giver. 

****Also the center of the country. It's small, y'all. 

*****We also all agreed that our expectations had been quite low. We apologize, Andorra, for not having more faith in you. 

******This attention to celebrating is easily one of the greatest things about this family. Got a birthday coming up? Let us know! Girl, we love cake!

*******We all found "McAuto" to be very funny. 

********Like ya do. 

*********See * if you're wondering why that's another point even though it is technically still Spain.