Saying goodbye to the country of Andorra was hard. It's such a beautiful place nestled in the Pyrenees. La Massana, our home for the week which sits at about 1300m above sea level, has a uniform appearance to it, as do all of the towns in this tiny little country. On the pecking order of tiny European countries Andorra sits in approximately 5th place, sitting behind Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Leichtenstein and Malta. All of its buildings are clad in the local stone, a rustic, warm façade material which gives the buildings an antique feel even if they're only a few years old.

Andorra thrives on tourism, particularly for its skiing in the winter months, and hiking and cycling in the summer months, and is renowned as a tax haven for the mega wealthy.

Andorra and in particular La Massana where we stayed, has great wi fi. Every business, café or restaurant has free access for its customers. A couple of clicks and you're in, just for buying a cup of coffee or a bottle of water. It's also relatively cheap compared to some places in Europe. A stubby of beer is only $1.50 Euro, sometimes less.

We enjoyed our last breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning and bid farewell to the friendly reception staff at 8.30am. We caught a mini bus to the main bus depot and were on the way to Barcelona by a touch after 9am, a slight misunderstanding over our two bike bags which failed to appear on the booking form almost relegating us to an 11am departure until our thrifty bus driver managed to save the day and fit the bags into his luggage compartment.

The three hour trip was fairly uneventful, and we all tried to catch up on some sleep after a late night saying goodbye to the riding group at the Commencal Bar followed by a massive T Bone steak next door and way too much to drink (for Wendy and I anyway).

Deciding to hire a car to give us some freedom during our stay in the Costa Brava, we mucked around at the hire car place for about an hour while each of the customer service people played tag team with each other's customers in a hopeless display of how not to run a car rental office.

We then drove the 140kms to Tossa De Mar and settled in to our apartment for the next 5 nights, enjoying a walk along the beach, watched a game of beach soccer and walked up to the old town - 'Vila Vella enceinte', which is the only example of a fortified medieval town still standing on the Catalan coast. Its present appearance dates back to the end of the 14th century.

After a fairly disappointing and expensive dinner having being touted by one of Lygon Street's finest who guessed our nationality after his third attempt - Dutch, Belgian…Australian, we headed off to bed, eager to catch up on some sleep.