Sunday Jan 23: Beating the Barcelona Bandits.

Last autumn, friends of ours were towing their caravan on the motorway skirting Barcelona when they heard a loud bang appearing to come from their caravan front/ car rear area. A car then pulled alongside them, one of the passengers leaning out of the window and pointing to the caravan tyre. Instinctive reaction: pull in and deal with an obvious emergency.

If you did stop, you would find that the car containing the helpful, gesticulating passenger would also stop, you would presume, to offer further assistance. However, the occupants of the car would rob you. It might be a straightforward hold-up or a distraction theft, that is, one of them would take you to point out the damage while the others rifled through the car. Afterwards, you would also notice a dent in your caravan or car where the thieves had thrown an object to create the bang you heard that was meant to authenticate the fictitious crisis.

That’s the background. So, it’s 11.00 am on a sunny Sunday morning and here we are going around Barcelona on the motorway. Bang, there’s a thump from low down on the rear of our car. A car pulls past us with passenger pointing animatedly to the car wheel, as if to indicate a deflating tyre. The car signals us to pull over: they clearly aim to help us. There’s a moment of indecision on our part before the penny drops. Our vehicle is handling fine, no evidence of a flat type or any other problem.

The advice is: keep driving- fairly obvious really- and that is what we did. The Good Samaritan bandits shot off at the next exit. We pulled in to the next services, i.e. plenty of folks around, to see what damage their missile had caused. Thankfully, none we could detect: it must have hit the tough plastic skirt running round the bottom sill of the car. Our friends also carried on driving, but did discover some damage to the tailgate of their car.

Shame we didn’t get any pictures: they didn’t stay around long enough. On the other hand, if we had stopped, they would have pinched the camera, so no pix either way!