New Adventures, New Experience!

As we were preparing for this trip, I spent some time reading up on everything I felt was related to travel in France, Spain and Portugal.
Sometime last year I read in a caravanning magazine about problems encountered on the ‘foreign’ motorways by tourists towing caravans.

There were all sorts of frightening stories, from being gassed while you slept in service areas, to highway robbery as you drove along!!!!
Peter calmed me down by insisting that all these things were in a minority, not the norm.
However, I decided to take a few recommended precautions advised by previous travellers. Number 1…..always travel with your camera ready so you can take a photo should you need evidence……………..well this tip paid off big-time today.

We left Castello D’Empuries at 11am this morning to travel south to Villanova, which is about 45km south of Barcelona. It’s not far from a town called Sitges which is in the Costa Dorada. I’ve wanted to visit Sitges since we were here on a family holiday in 2000.

As we drove on the ‘toll free’ bit of the AP7 around Barcelona, we heard a huge thump/thud.. We both exclaimed……’WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT!’

Because of the article I had read, about keeping a camera ready, I had our camera in my hand as we heard the thud. I immediately turned it on, and as I did a silver Audi zoomed past us motioning that we definitely needed to pull in on the hard shoulder, which was very wide at this point.

We both felt extremely calm, even though the thump had un-nerved us, and I held the camera up to the windscreen and started taking photos of the car telling us to pull over.

As they saw the camera they took off at a rate of knots, through the heavy traffic, not to be seen again.
We both feel very ‘looked after’. I would never have considered carrying the camera in my hand had I not read an article saying this was the best course of action.

We both normally panic slightly if/when we hear something wrong while towing. Had we stopped, as the Audi wanted us to, we think this would have been a very different blog tonight…….probably a long story of how we were deceived by some wayward youngsters while driving through Barcelona, with all our money, passports, laptop, mobiles, sat-nav…etc. being stolen. As it is, we have been spared the inconvenience of the disruption that would have been caused and we are able to wend our way further south as planned.

By the way, when we stopped at the site we are on tonight, there wasn’t any sign of problems with our caravan, however we now have a small crack and scratch on our passenger side rear light which was caused by whatever they threw at us as they drove past. It had been, as for-warned, a scam to get us to stop in a difficult place to rob us of our easy pickings, or possibly even worse…..the car and caravan!
We know we are being looked after as we travel.