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!
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Thursday, 27 January 2011
2011 The Blog Stops Here
Jan 19th to 22nd : Alconbury to The Pyrenees
We left home on 19th Jan, grateful for the return of reasonable weather. A good run of 430 miles through France took us to an overnighter at motorway services 40 miles beyond Troyes. Our thoughts of heading towards ever improving weather were somewhat shattered on looking out next morning….
Keep travelling south, it’s bound to improve! And it did: we ran out of the snow in about an hour. So now let’s stop for coffee & croissants: even on motorways, we said, in France you still get freshly made coffee.
But times move on, and the motorway services presented us with banks of drinks machines. I counted them: there were an amazing 18 machines scattered around in groups, not all the same, most able to dispense a huge variety of drinks. We had an acceptable chocolate drink each, but I wondered how the economics of this high-tech set-up compares with a couple of café girls. We needed the services of a person anyway as the machine delivered only one drink instead of the two we’d paid for!
That evening we arrive at a pleasant site on the banks of the river Rhone. There’s a biting wind making it feel very cold, but wrapping up warm we take an evening walk into the pleasant town of Tournon-sur-Rhone. There are a number of huge barges plying the river and it’s a shame we don’t have navigable rivers of this size in the UK to slightly ease our road congestion.
Pyrenees next stop, just into Spain. We’ve stayed at this site before and it’s beautifully located in pine and cork oak hills. Still cold and even windier but sunny, so we togged up as on the day before and had a splendid hour’s brisk walk. It’s a wonder the site is open in winter as we were the only touring folks there, but there is a residential section so it presumably takes no more manpower to run the whole lot.
We left home on 19th Jan, grateful for the return of reasonable weather. A good run of 430 miles through France took us to an overnighter at motorway services 40 miles beyond Troyes. Our thoughts of heading towards ever improving weather were somewhat shattered on looking out next morning….
Keep travelling south, it’s bound to improve! And it did: we ran out of the snow in about an hour. So now let’s stop for coffee & croissants: even on motorways, we said, in France you still get freshly made coffee.
But times move on, and the motorway services presented us with banks of drinks machines. I counted them: there were an amazing 18 machines scattered around in groups, not all the same, most able to dispense a huge variety of drinks. We had an acceptable chocolate drink each, but I wondered how the economics of this high-tech set-up compares with a couple of café girls. We needed the services of a person anyway as the machine delivered only one drink instead of the two we’d paid for!
That evening we arrive at a pleasant site on the banks of the river Rhone. There’s a biting wind making it feel very cold, but wrapping up warm we take an evening walk into the pleasant town of Tournon-sur-Rhone. There are a number of huge barges plying the river and it’s a shame we don’t have navigable rivers of this size in the UK to slightly ease our road congestion.
Pyrenees next stop, just into Spain. We’ve stayed at this site before and it’s beautifully located in pine and cork oak hills. Still cold and even windier but sunny, so we togged up as on the day before and had a splendid hour’s brisk walk. It’s a wonder the site is open in winter as we were the only touring folks there, but there is a residential section so it presumably takes no more manpower to run the whole lot.
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