On Our Last Legs in Barcelona

The drive down across the French border to the metropolis of Barcelona took no more than four hours and once the breaks had decided to work, was relatively easy. However, as the city rose around us, melting into the sea ahead, the van began to stutter... the radio choked... the lights started to flash... and we thought – if we stop now, we are not going to start again. So we drove up to a nice car parking place outside Barcelona FC’s Nou Camp and sure enough, the battery was dead. Instead of rushing to call the rescue service, we queued up for a tour and spent a pleasant hour strolling through the mighty football club’s home ground; gazing at the large silver trophies lined up in glass cases, snapping away at the grass mown into stripes. At about 3.30 we returned to our tired old van and made the expensive call to the European AA. They said they would send someone within one hour and a half. One hour and a half passed us by so we rang back: they needed the dimensions of the van (no idea why they had not rang us to ASK for the dimensions of the van). So another hour passed by and eventually near to 7pm a big tow truck arrived with a friendly Spaniard. He spoke more English than the last guy.

After the van had been winched up onto the trailer and we were up in the driver’s cab, the ‘rescue service’ explained that he wasn’t sure the garage would be open but he imagined we would just about get there in time. Of course, this filled us with confidence. Fortunately this time it hadn’t closed its sliding doors and we could book the van in. Unfortunately they were just about to close so there was no chance of us getting the van back within the day and we had a little trouble communicating that we could not wait three days until Friday as he, nor any of the others in the garage spoke English. He led us back into the dark workshop where he had a computer set up with google translator (the wonders of the modern technology!) and we had a strange conversation that concluded in his promise that he would look on Thursday and an unusual translation that he would text us if he could do the work. Now the only issue was where we would live for the next couple of days.

Once more luck seemed to be on our side for once and the AA phoned back to tell us that a taxi had been booked to collect us from the garage at 9.15, take us into the city, and to a hotel. The mysterious taxi arrived to find us on the grassy verge between the two sides of the roads, surrounded with a collection of miss-matched bags filled with what we could squeeze in, bearing in mind that our whole lives were in the van and we didn’t really have much of a bag between us. We were whirled away through the complicated network of streets and dropped off outside a fairly smart ‘Travellodge’ style hotel, with no fee required by the driver. Our first question as we checked in was ‘where are we?!’. The time by now was nearer to 10pm and we hadn’t had any dinner and were feeling quite frazzled. But we did not know how long we would be inside the city, more importantly, how long we would be able to walk (just about) to go out for a drink or two.

Living like the Spanish, we hit the streets for tapas and wandered along Las Ramblas at midnight. Despite wandering in the wrong direction, and having an hour’s walk in heels back to the hotel, it was perfect. A great introduction to Spain.