Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar was a snap, but as soon as I drove off the ferry ramp in Ceuta, a well-armed gent in full Spanish government regalia waved me to pull over, approached my window and, in a voice that can be best described as satanic, said only "passport". I was confused but also slightly horrified and so I surrendered my passport with minimal fuss, and was then lead inside a brick building and placed into a windowless detention room where I waited for what felt like a decade but what was apparently only four hours.
As it turns out, taking a rental vehicle off the mainland is frowned upon and my good friends at Avis had taken it upon themselves to contact the authorities in Ceuta and demand I be detained and my car impounded.
I was held hostage into the evening while my captors argued amongst themselves about what to do me with me. After much hand-wringing, I was finally placed on the last ferry back to Tarif that evening, only this time without a vehicle and with a considerably less sunny disposition than I had departed with that same morning. Fellow passengers I'm sure must have been confused to see my cantankerous self dragging luggage aboard without a car..
The remainder of the trip in Spain went smoothly enough if you can believe it - I paid through the nose to rent another car but I made it back to Barcelona and chalked the whole experience up to just that; an experience I wouldn’t soon forget.
It wasn’t until several months later when I received a speeding ticket in the mail from the Spanish authorities that I realized the fun might continue! As it turns out, Spain is littered with speed cameras and I was nabbed (with photographic evidence) going close to a hundred in my haste to make it back to Barcelona.
I should have paid the ticket. I intended to pay the ticket. I never paid the ticket. I think the totality of my experiences - the additional car rental expense, the mental anguish etc. lead me to determine that my second trip to Spain might have to be my last. I can't condone my own behavior.
A couple months later I received a second, somewhat more urgent letter from the Spanish authorities warning that if I did not pay the fine in a timely manner they would, and this is a literal translation, come and "crush my car". Which is just fantastic to consider. Not only because I own two eminently crushable vehicles, but also because the idea of the Spanish government sending a couple stooges across the pond to Waterbury, Vermont to dish out some cold, hard justice is too great an image to torpedo. And so I'm still waiting, and partially hoping, to wake up one morning and find my Chevy Spark flattened in the driveway. I'd probably deserve it.
