A2 and Calatayud November 10th

November 10^th.

I can’t even remember where we spent the night, I mean I know it was at a service station on the side of a motorway, that there was another service station across the road, and a solar panel farm, and it was somewhere between Madrid and Zaragoza, but that’s as close as I can get really. I woke up feeling quite good, I didn’t have a lot of sleep, but I was OK, it was drizzling on and off, but nothing too bad, and I was looking forward to a shortish drive (a couple of hundred kms) up the road a bit towards Barcelona.

We weren’t in a hurry, so we had a slow start to the day, I even gave myself a haircut, desperate to improve on what I had seen in recent photos.

We left our stop at about 10 I guess, headed north east, the scenery was beautiful, autumn colours, wind warms, solar farms, high viaducts, little villages just off the main road.

I still don’t know what went wrong, I have replayed it dozens of times (nothing changes unfortunately) I know I was going too fast for the conditions, and though I was aware of road works signs telling me to slow down (which I did), I wasn’t prepared for what I was confronted with when I came around a sweeping bend. In the middle of the road (motorway with two lanes going each way with a wide median barrier running down the middle) on my side, closing off both lanes, were a heap of cones, metal signs, lights, and water filled plastic containers. It was the road workers intention for me to do an “s bend” so that I went through the median barrier (which had been opened) and drove onto the other side of the road where the two lanes had been divided by cones, and was now one lane going each way. Well of course I applied the brakes, there is no way a heavy and tallish truck like ours could negotiate an s bend that sharp, in the drizzle on brand-new oily tarseal at 80kms as I was going. Of course the truck went into a skid, and try as I might (turning into the skid……) it could not/would not regain traction. It is an amazing feeling realising that there is nothing that can be done, we were skidding out of control towards either all the barriers, a crash barrier in the middle of the road, or the oncoming traffic. Thankfully, if there can be a good outcome, I guess we had it. We hit the crash barrier front on in the truck, I’m not sure what speed we had slowed to at this stage, but it was with sufficient force to smash open the metal barriers and continue on until we were stopped by the truck belly-flopping over a deep culvert, with the front wheels in the ditch and the back still on the road up top. Thankfully none of us had even the slightest bruise and apart from being shocked and therefore freezing in the cold rain despite coats, jerseys, scarves etc, we were remarkably healthy. It was very fortunate that we didn’t crash through the barrier and continue on about 20 metres or we would have fallen about 50 metres onto the valley below, or gone into the oncoming traffic, or the third scenario was going off the viaduct another 50 metres or so down the road and falling a hundred metres or so. However that still didn’t solve the problem of being stuck in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, with a truck that wasn’t going anywhere.

A nice Spanish man who didn’t seem to speak a word of English pulled up after a couple of minutes and phoned the local police for us, which was great because I wouldn’t have been able to speak enough Spanish on the phone to be understood. I mean I’m OK ordering coffee or beer or quite a few other things, and my numbers are coming on, and other bits of conversation, but I wouldn’t have been able to go into great depth about an MVA.

Once this bloke had called the police we just had to wait. While we were standing on the closed part of the road waiting for the police to come, a van came around the corner and did just what we had except he had the good sense to head for the mobile barriers instead of the solid one, so though he sent things flying and got a few scratches and bumps on his van ( and sent us flying too as he was headed straight for us initially) he was OK enough to take off again as soon as he had identified that we were OK and the police were on their way (I actually wondered if they were a little dodgy, and if it was the thought of the police turning up that sent them off so quickly????) they were nice to us though, and I’m sure had we needed them, would have assisted us.

The Civil Guardia (Local traffic police) turned up very shortly after, we had not had to wait very long at all. There were two officers, one much more confident with conversing in English than the other, but both very friendly and incredibly kind and helpful. They took statements and checked out all our paperwork which was all in order and easily accessed thanks to Diana’s organisational skills, and fussiness with keeping important documents in her own safe keeping.

We tried to phone our insurance company in France but thankfully (imagine trying to speak to a French insurance company about an accident/claim on the telephone when you are a bit shocked) Diana’s phone couldn’t call out, so instead after doing the poor women tourist travelling without strong men routine, the officer called the local towing firm for us and organised to have us sorted by them on the understanding we would pay up front and deal with insurance later. We agreed as we didn’t have an option.

It took another three hours for the tow truck to arrive, realise that they needed a crane, send that truck back, bring another one, borrow a crane from the road crew working down the road, bring that back to the scene, hook up our truck in a cradle of straps so her front was able to be lifted back to road height, while another tow truck pulled her backwards onto the road.  They then drove her onto the tow truck, strapped her down and we all drove back in the front of the truck to the local village garage. We met many lovely people that day. The man who stopped to offer help, and phoned the police for us. The two Portuguese men who crashed beside us, and checked we were OK with help on the way before they scarpered. The man who drove down from the work site to check we were OK. The two police officers whose first question was,” are you all OK?” (In fact that was the first thing everyone said to us that day!) The road crew (numbering about ten who arrived in two trucks, rescued what signs and barriers they could, re-erected their barriers and warnings (which were scattered far and wide by us and the other blokes) unbent with sledge hammers and other heavy methods their signage which had been munted by us, the tow truck drivers, the people back at the garage, and the road crew who lent the tow-truck drivers their own crane truck to help out with our rescue and then drove the tow-truck driver back to the garage 25kms away once he was finished because we had taken up all the room in the other truck.

So we ended up having lunch at a café/hotel a couple of hundred metres from the garage in a little town called Calatayud, while the men had their lunch (and closed the garage until 3pm). Diana suggested we stay at a hotel that night which turned out to be a very good idea. Though the truck could have been taken away later that afternoon (they wired the bumper up and whacked a few things with a sledge hammer as well as checking the truck out for road worthiness, before declaring she was fit to continue. Of course she needs repairs, like a new front panel, and some major work done on her under- carriage including the step we use for getting in and out, which lowers (or should I say, “used to lower”) at the flick of an electric switch. Anyway, we left the truck at the garage for them to give her a proper look over while we settled in to our hotel. It wasn’t the flashest hotel in the west but it had fresh white cotton sheets on the beds, good lighting, comfortable beds, smelt good, and apart from the used, men’s undies Diana found on the floor under the bed the next morning, was clean and tidy. We also had breakfast as part of the deal and to Hilary’s delight a tv and a bath with lots of bath foam available. For us it was luxury, and we thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so we decided to stay another night too.