Now it so happens that in the aforementioned trip to Croatia with my two friends and the side-splittingly funny Irish girls, we rented a car and drove to Montenegro for the day. It was lucky that we had met the Irish girls, because at 18 and 19, my friends and I weren’t actually old enough to rent a car.

We set of across the border, expectations of all things unexpected, but shortly after we were stopped by two policemen. Seems, on reflection, that we had been going to fast a few kilometres previously, and the traffic cops had radioed ahead to their colleagues down the road, who then pulled us over.

Upon seeing a car-load of young blond and red-headed girls, the older of the two stepped aside as the younger one swaggered forwards, and, I guess, began to give us the hard word on our transgression.

We gawked and flailed our arms, indicating incomprehension. Did he speak English?

No. Did we speak Serbian?

No. What about German? (From us to him).

No. Italian? (We all shook our heads).

Spanish? – French? – Russian? (The options volleyed back and forth).

We then determined that we shared no mutually comprehensible language, other than that of theatrics, so the now blushing policeman acted out that we had been speeding, and that if we continued in that way, it would be “katastroph”.

Oh yes, officer, we understand.

“Katastroph” – it was repeated for emphasis, and then we were let off to continue on our merry way. Phew…

The rest of the day continued without a hitch, well… there was one other airheads-in-car moment. We had entered a particularly long tunnel, and only realised that it wasn’t ventilated halfway through when we where feeling a little high and dizzy from the fumes. We hastily wound our windows up, and started to panic about the associated health risks, when the driver (one of the Irish girls) started to fret that she couldn’t see anything anymore. The anxiety level increased several notches… and then we realised she was still wearing her sunglasses.

It was all without a hitch after that…