I was thrilled to bag Andorra, my 62nd country. The Andorra stamp in my passport is one I’d been after for years. And there it was, plain as day, right on its own page in my passport.

Andorra is a mountain valley with 70,000 inhabitants, all of whom speak Spanish that’s spelled with a lot of Xs and Qs. Andorra is the only all-native Catalan-speaking country in the world. It’s a beautiful, refreshingly sophisticated country with architecture that reminds you of Switzerland, not Southern France. It seems a million miles from Toulouse. And it has over 3,000 stores.

Andorra is the duty-free capital of Europe – people flock here to shop from all over the continent. There are always lines at customs going in and out of the country. I pictured people buying cigarettes and alcohol, but I was wrong. They were buying every brand you’ve ever heard of.

It’s now 7pm. The stores are closing in 30 minutes. I need a pair of boxer shorts and a new t-shirt for tomorrow. I manage to get them just in time (Italians, by the way, don’t wear boxers, and few French men do; I don’t know about Spaniards). I head back to the hotel for a nice shower.

Then I go for dinner. It’s the usual cheeseless pizza, but this one was memorable. I’ve never had a thinner-crusted pizza. This pizza’s crust was about as thin as a piece of shirt cardboard and extremely tough. I had to use a steak knife and bear down on it to break the crust into small enough pieces to eat. Easily the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten, and I was starving. And I was upset, because I’d just dropped my camera.

I had been tired after a long day. I was wearing my clean underwear and my new t-shirt, and I was hungry and looking at restaurant after restaurant trying to find a place to eat. It got a bit chilly so I went to put on my sweater. My right hand thought it was giving my camera to my left hand, and my left hand though my right hand had it. I dropped the camera onto the hard sidewalk and glass shattered all over. I pick up the camera and notice that the lens was pretty much okay. I’d shattered the UV filter I had on the front to protect it.