He’s a quick test for you. What do you know about Andorra? I know very little. Mainly because they have never made it through to the grand final of the Eurovision Song contest (sidebar: they are actually the only country NEVER to have made it to the Grand Final…a record in itself). They have never made it through to the finals of the European football championships (correction. They have, but always get knocked out. They have only won thirteen matches since becoming recognised by FIFA in 1996) and they were never in Jeux sans Frontiers, so those are my 3 main sources of European reference points gone. (I’ve done some proper research for this blog. This is proper journalism you are paying for here.)

I thought that it was a tax haven, but in holiday terms, it’s 1 hour 45 minutes away from where we are, so we could easily do a day trip there. The temperatures in Catalonia have been extraordinarily high this year, and the forecast for where we are was 38°. In Andorra it was 25°, so we decided that that may be a little bit more comfortable, but we should perhaps take something with long sleeves just in case! You never know, 25° can feel quite nippy.

I’ve just said I don’t know an awful lot about Andora, which led me to asking what may be considered to be an extremely stupid question. (That seems quite common amongst us on this holiday.) “Do we need our passports to get into Andorra?” I enquired. I then answered it myself by saying, “probably not because they are a Nicole Scherzinger country aren’t they? “

Josh was there last year, and piped in that actually there is a passport control channel, but they just waved you through. We decided that we had better take our passports just in case, so the challenge then began to find where we had put them, since we hadn’t seen them since the airport, and also how we could ensure that Tibu did not lose his between the car and passport control.

We got up early (by early I mean 9 am) and the plan was that we head off, and about half an hour into our journey, stop and have breakfast somewhere, and then head on. When I got up, Tibu was on the phone chatting away in Spanish to somebody, which in all fairness is not unusual bearing in mind he is Spanish and we are in Spain. He said that just before he dropped off to sleep the previous night, he suddenly realised that of course, technically we are taking the car into another country, so he’d better check with the company as to what the situation was. The hire company said “of course you can take the car wherever you want, but as soon as you are out of Spain, you are not insured”. That really is not a very helpful answer. But, unsurprisingly, for another €30, you can cover it in Andorra as well. The credit card was retrieved (he doesn’t keep it near his passport so he found it quickly) he read out the long number on the card and before we knew, we were all set to go Andorra. Or were we? (That was a rhetorical question for a bit of jeopardy to keep you interested.)

Since Josh, Ali and Nico have arrived, we are a two hire car family and we were all going, so we would need to make sure that both hire cars were correctly insured in Andorra. When Josh arrived, he had told us that because he was a preferred member of Avis, when he arrived the other evening, the car was ready, all the paperwork was done and he literally picked it up within about 15 minutes. So he may have it included or at least sorting it should be easy enough.

So, Josh began ringing Avis, but there was a 25 minute wait. So as not to slow things down, he suggested that they just hang on the phone and start the journey. At least they wouldn’t have to decide what music to listen to in the car, as they would be listening to the on-hold music on the phone.

We arrived in town called Ponts, parked up and walked to a local bar for some breakfast . It was at this point that Josh told us that for him to get the extra cover (which Tibu got very quickly on the phone) he would have to go to an Avis office about 50 km away, so that wasn’t going to happen was it. Okmobility 1: Avis 0.

What to do? Remember we are only about 30 minutes away from home, a sensible solution would have been to say “well let’s go another day and will sort things out with the car insurance”. But oh no, over breakfast, we conceived a plan. In the car, the boys had been doing a bit of research, and discovered that there was a place where they could park the car on the Spanish side of the border. This is only about 20 minutes from the centre of the Andorran capital.

So the plan was that the five of went in to Andorra, dropped Nikki, Rach and Karen off, Tibu would drive back and I would navigate back to the border, we would pick up the boys, and ferry them into Andorra as well.

I’m currently reading a spy war novel called Berlin game, which unsurprisingly is set in Berlin and, spoiler alert, involves trying to get somebody from East Berlin into West Berlin. So there’s an awful lot of talk about checkpoints and passport control and the suspicious activities that happened at these points. I was just wondering, were we human trafficking here?

We continued our journey which was absolutely beautiful. The Pyrenees are stunning. We arrived at the car park which is literally next to the border control. Josh, Ali and Nico parked up and went and sat in a bar (which apparently served fabulous chips) and we drove through the border.

To start with, you effectively drive through a building (which we later discovered was customs) and then through some booths. Looking at the booths, I would say that they were designed and built in the late 1980s, and in each booth was an Andorran border control guard. However, very few of them had their windows open, and most of them were just sat chatting to each other.

As we pulled past, I was very inclined to knock on the window, thrust my passport their way and say can I have a stamp please? I mean come on, the only good thing that has come out of Brexit so far, has been the fact that we get stamped passports again. However, I restrained myself and we continued our journey into the capital of Andorra.

To be continued…

Next time; you can’t roam around here; the world’s biggest Duty Free Shop; and Andorra, easy to get in to, harder to get out!