The Robbery

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As some of you are aware, we were robbed...on a toll road north of Barcelona....very cleverly done. We had stopped at a service area and we were probably identified as tourists because we spoke English. We got back into our car, Bill removed his wallet from his hip pocket and I slid the toll ticket into it, laying it on the console between us.

A car pulled up beside us, flashing lights, and the driver gestured to the rear of our car and indicated that something was wrong, and we should pull over...which we did. He LEAPED out of his car, and got us to look up under the fender of the passenger back tire. Apparently, during this ruckus, his accomplice entered our car via the driver side, took Bill’s wallet, my purse, and the day pack with Bill’s computer, and my miniPad. Suddenly the guy said goodbye and dashed off in his car.

It took about five km before Bill said, “where is my wallet?” The BIG problem at the moment was how to exit the toll road with no ticket and only 5 Euros. Fortunately, we were able to flag down a passing police car which led us to the Gironde airport police where we could report the loss.

Good to know: most airport police will have speakers of several languages AND a telephone that can call anywhere in the world. We filed a complete report, called to cancel my Visa card. However, we could not call our local bank (Catskill Hudson) to cancel our debit cards (which we used to withdraw cash) because it was November 11, a USA national holiday. We reached out to FB. When we finally reached Catskill Hudson later, the woman said, “You have quite a network of friends; we heard from people from all over the states.”

We continued on to Barcelona to our hotel, for which fortunately, we had already prepaid. We thought that we were getting money wired to us, but when we reached Western Union, we learned that Capital One had not responded to notification from Visa. It was now 10 hours since we had eaten, we had 4 euros in our pocket...and French SIMM cards in our phones. Stayed tuned.

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