What nobody tells you before traveling to Albania

There are things no blog tells you until you live them, no matter how much you read before packing. After 7 days in Albania, here's what I wish I'd known ahead of time — nothing serious, but things that save you some surprises.

Car insurance gets pushed on you twice, almost every time. We booked through a comparator that already included zero excess, convinced that was the end of it. Even so, at the pickup counter in Tirana they insisted on offering us "the good insurance," as if what we already had were second-rate. Having the policy printed out, not just on the phone, shut the conversation down in under a minute.

The Tirana-Sarande road is a real 4 hours, not the 3 the GPS shows at first. Llogara's curves are some of the most beautiful driving roads I've done in a long time, but they demand you go slow — it's not a stretch to be in a hurry on, and any attempt to shave time there costs you nerves, not minutes.

Cash rules more than we expected. We went in with the modern idea that "everything's paid by card" and found that a lot of beach clubs and small stalls, especially in Ksamil, don't take it, or charge a strange fee if you push it.

Albania is, without exaggeration, one of the destinations where we had to plan day-to-day spending the least — and where we enjoyed ourselves the most precisely because of that.

The best sunbeds in Ksamil sell out by August. We arrived around eleven in the morning at one of the best-known beach clubs and there was almost nothing left up front. If you go in peak season, either get there early or book ahead; there's no middle ground.

None of this will ruin your trip if you don't know it. But knowing it ahead of time saves you a rough moment or two — and a euro or two you didn't need to spend.