It's back....

We flew Ryanair to Girona, which Ryanair call Gerona (Barcelona) presumably on the same basis as Stansted is called London, i.e. it's only an hour away on the bus! We stayed overnight in the Novotel near the airport. Next day we got a taxi to the place where it was supposed to be. On the way there we explained our little mishap to the driver who was almost preedictable in his blaming of the eastern european "immigrants" who now frequent Barcelona. Given that the guy we spoke to on the phone who claimed to have van gave me an eastern european name, he could have been correct, but he did seem a bit of a Daily Mail kind of guy. Still he got us there.

After parting with some few hundred Euros (for storage) we were taken to an outlying storage yard where recovered vehicles lay around in abundance many of them having been recovered from accidents, clearly. There she was, in pretty much the same condition as when we lost her - except for the fridge. They hadn't cleaned it out and the stuff inside it had more or less liquidised in the warm weather. We cleaned it out with disinfectant (and much gagging), then tidied up inside. They had pulled everything out of the lockers and left everything that they didn't want lying around on the floor. We gleaned some information from what they took:

• the guy must have been about my size (all my clothes were gone) but with different sized feet (socks and shoes were left on the floor).
• his woman must have been bigger than Carol (almost all her stuff was left behind except for some stuff which was loose fitting or which would stretch, like track suits).
• he was obviously inclined to athleticism (my bike was gone) whilst she clearly wasn't (Carol's bike, the better of the two by far, was still there).
• they were a bit choosy about wine (the open bottle was untouched whilst an unoped one had been consumed).

I was surprised by the lack of damage to any point of entry. All the doors were fine and also the windows. I commented on this to the guy in charge at the depot. "Ah", he said, "professionals would not need to damage it, they would use an electronic device." I asked how they would do that and he told me "they wait round the corner whilst you are leaving, then train a device on you whilst you press the "bleeper". The device picks up the frequency and the coding from the bleeper so they can reproduce them after you have gone." He said they would probably have used a low loader to take it away after they had opened it, and indeed the mileage on the clock did seem to be pretty much what I remembered it to be before we left it. I probably helped them by making sure the door was locked by closing it, then opening it and closing it again. You learn a little more each day....

After we had cleaned up we left, in the early afternoon, and went back to Cadaqués which was the last place we had stayed at before we went to Barcelona (a nice fenced, monitored public parking area).  The weather was once again fine and the little town was still very attractive. Next day we headed north again to France, stopping only at a supermarket to pick up a case of Cava, which was a few pence cheaper than it would have been here!

In France we went through (or actually round) Toulouse and on to the west coast where we headed north. We kept moving up the coast and in a couple of days or so we had made it into Brittany, which was where we wanted to look around. We spent the next few days moving slowly eastwards throuh Brittany and into Nomandy (getting lost only a few times and then mainly because the roads were suddenly closed in the middle of nowhere). We spent a pleasant morning at Mont St Michel.

We caught our sailing from Dunkirk and then we were back. The van went to Webbs so they could quote us for getting it back up to scratch (there wasn't much damage that wouldn't be covered by a good valeting, but we needed a price to replace all the electronic stuff and also the fridge, which still remains unusable in spite of several attempts to render it odourless). We have that estimate and now we need to discuss it with the insurance company, who have so far not budged on the "spare keys in the van" issue and the Omsbudsman hasn't come back on it. All will come out in the wash, eventually, I feel sure. I took the van down to Brockenhurst where I was looking after the hotel for a long weekend whilst Robin was gallivanting off the the USA to see the Indianapolis 500. More about that later.