[chryuop]

I think saying the word AND can be misleading. What you get is a time adverbial clause. Instead of using the word AND I would use more the word WHEN.
When foreigner study English are introduced to what is called IF clauses (if I...then...). The thing they teach us is that the same relation of the tenses in a IF clause is present also when you find WHEN...this creates some confusion when you face the conditional in Japanese.
I will write to you what one of my books says about と...I think it explains it pretty well.

と follows a verb or an adjective in the plain present form and creates a time adverbial clause or a conditional clause depending of the tense of the main verb.
If the main verb is in the past tense, the clause with と functions as time adverbial clause, and the entire sentence expresses what happened after some event.
図書館に行くと、高橋さんがいました

This is where you get the AND, because in English it works well with both WHEN and AND. So you can say both "when I went to the library Mr Takahashi was there" and "I went to the library and Mr.Takahashi was there".
Similar situations can be created when the verb in the main phrase is not past, but I cannot write out the whole book.

Instead of trying to find a translation, try to understand the meaning of と. When I see it I immediately think that its purpose is to show 2 consequent actions in which the speaker has no control over. When you find it with a present tense in the main phrase you fall in a natural consequence.