The plan for the trip (which ended up being a nightmare...)

Back in May 2024, I booked a trip to try and tick off four countries whilst taking on my first micro-nation (/micro-nations if you count Andorra).
Thursday: Fly from London to Toulousse and run there
Friday: Get the bus to Andorra and run in the afternoon
Saturday: Get the bus to Barcelona
Sunday: Run the Barcelona Marathon
Monday: Fly to Nice and get the train to Monacco then run there in the afternoon
Tuesday: Fly home
In the end, due to a deliberate change of plan, followed by a few unintended changes and a mix of minor and major setbacks, I ended up only running in two countries. Andorra was the segment of the trip that actually went the best!

The journey to Andorra

Andorra is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't actually have an airport. The mountainous nature of the country also makes railways a bit of a challenge. So, instead of flying direct, most tourists fly into France or Spain and drive or get a taxi / bus up to Andorra. We flew into Toulousse (never sure how to spell it) on Thursday morning and went to check in to our Ibis budget hotel near the airport. As we were on the early side, we had to wait an hour or so until the room was ready. The room and hotel was of the standard expected and budget was an accurate description, but all we needed was somehwere to sleep. As I'd initially planned to run that afternoon, I booked our Andbus tickets for Friday morning. However, a few weeks before the trip, I decided to not run in France as I'm planning on doing the Marathon du Medoc at some point and thought a solo run around airport outskirts was a bit of a pointless way to further tire my legs. It was only when we got there that I realised changing the Andbus to Thursday afternoon and getting more time to explore Andorra would have been a good idea. Instead, we had a quick nap in the hotel then got a taxi into the centre of the city for a short walk around and dinner.

The next morning, we walked back to the airport for our bus up to Andorra. Andbus have quite a few different sized vehicles, for us it seemed like more people were travelling in from Barcelona as our 20-30 setaer toiletless bus up from France was much smaller than the full length coach down to Barcelona the next day. Although, it turned out to be a much nicer journey. We got on and left the airport at 10:15 and came into Andorra about three and a half hours later. Our tickets suggested that the bus driver would drop us right outside our hotel, and he did make a few stops on the way in for some skiiers at their resorts, but he skipped us and we got off at the final stop in the main bus station in Andorra la Vella.

After a twenty minute walk back sort of in the direction we came from, we got to Hotel Les Closes and checked in straight away. As we just brought small carry on suitcases, the number of gels I could bring was limited by what I could fit in my toiletries bag. I got to organising my things straight away to start the run as soon as possible. I went to check the Barcelona marathon course to figure out if there were any gels provided at the water stations to decided whether I should take out 2 or 3 of my total 6 gels. The conclusion was 3, but for a devestating reason. I was going to be in Barcelona on the 9th of March, and I saw on the website that the marathon was on the 16th...

The run

After a few minutes of trying to figure out how I could have possibly made such a glaringly obvious mistake (which I later figured out about halfway through the run), I set out from the hotel. As every company these days decides to slap "AI" on their product in their collectively terrible marketing attempts, I decided I'd do the same. On the bus up from Andorra, I was playing around with ChatGPT to try and get it to plan me a marathon route that would let me see some of the key sites in Andorra. After a few iterations of "can you make sure there is pavement on the whole route" and other requests, it had a route that seemed sensible from the little bit of checking that I did with google maps. However, it failed with any request I made for it to draw me some sort of map to look at, only managing a list of stops. Whilst running, I realised that it had created a largely logical route of places that follow on from eachother geographically, except for one stop on the route. To get the distance up, it decided to include one stop that resulted in the equivalent of following the costline of France, including a flight to French Guianna and back. It also came in quite short of the full marathon. So the chat GPT performance fell int the common category of "Pretty helpful but far from perfect".

Ciara wanted to see a few places as well as our time in Andorra was limited so we ended up walking the first few segments together. We walked down Avinguda Meritxell (ChatGPT's descrion as Andorra's Oxford Street was largely accurate) towards Placa del Poble. When we got there, it was completely blocked off and it looked like the whole surface was being relaid. As a result, we couldn't enjoy the mentioned stunning views.

Our next stop was Case de la Vall. This was also surrounded by construction walls and my moral level continued to fall. After this, Ciara and I went our seperate ways. She did actually manage to find a different way in and had a walk around before heading back to the hotel.

I carrie on westwards to Esglesia de Santa Coloma, a little church dating back to the 8th century with a cool cylindrical bell tower. After this came my favourite stop on the route - Pont de la Margineda. It's a medival bridge and ChatGPT was accurate again saying that it looks like something straight out of Lord of the Rings.


The next suggestion was to run up the Cami Ral (the flight to French Guiana). This is a path that runs from Andorra la Vella North to La Massana. Seeing as I was now southwest of Andorra la Vella, this seemed a bit odd, but I followed the instruction. I rand back through the centre of town and along the path, which was very enjoyable following the river up in a fair degree of peace and quiet compared to the people in the town centre and cars on the main road. When I got to La Massana, I saw that the next stop on the route was Avinguda Tarragona, the road I had run along to get back from the bridge to the centre of town.

I headed back down the path and through the centre of town in the direction of the bridge again, as there was a track-like path running parallel to the road which was good on the knees. The remaining Ai suggestions were the park in town (that I had already run past) and two thermal spas that I suspected you needed to pay to enter. I decided to just go up and down the paths and pavements a few times to get the distance up, before heading back past the hotel to a carrefour for a few supplies. Three marathons (at least attempted marathons) in four days = lots of baguettes.

I washed up and got changed then Ciara and I went for dinner in a Medival themed restaurant just up the road from the hotel that I spotted on the way to Carrefour. It was prime 90's Orlando design like it could have been plucked from highway 192. The next morning, we checked out and walked back down the path, that I was now very familiar with, on the way back to the bus station to head to Barcelona.