Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (part 1)

One of the great things about living in the UK is the super-low-cost flights you can get to weird and/or wonderful places in Europe. When Anthony got an email suggesting cheap flight packages to Barcelona, it didn't take long for a long-weekend plan to hatch. Anth really should be a travel agent, within 30 minutes of deciding to go we were booked on flights and excellent accomodation near the city centre, had Spanish car hire sorted, and also had the Thursday night booked at a hotel near Stansted airport that would neatly cover the car-parking and airport transfer parts. He's a machine!

So last Thursday night we hammered off to Stansted after work (for those that have it...), and on Friday morning we flew out to sunny, sunny Spain. And was it sunny!! About 23 degrees and perfect. We just fit into our Chevrolet KAOS oops I mean Kalos, but only because all four of us were sharing one suitcase! RyanAir charges you for each and every bag you check in, but the restrictions on carrying liquids mean you have to check in at least one bag!

After loading up we hit the highway, but soon hit a snag. On leaving Girona Airport, we passed underneath a gantry that clearly had something to do with tolls. Our ViaMichelin trip directions had also mentioned a toll - but we had breezed through a green traffic light and a raised barrier. 20km later, we arrived at another toll booth. Only this time, there were no green lights, and all the barriers were most definitely down. We rolled up to a machine which required a ticket that we didn't possess - we can only imagine it should have been given to us as we left the airport. But before we could back out and try and explain ourselves at a manual booth, we had a half-dozen cars up our exhaust pipe preventing our escape. And then the beeping started...

The racket eventually attracted the attention of an attendant, whom I shall call Alonso. Unfortunately, although he was able to comprehend our predicament (thanks to Anth's decent Espagnol) and call off the tooting masses, he made one critical mistake. After using his special powers to tell the toll machine how much we owed it, Alonso grabbed Anth's credit card and stuck it in the wrong slot.

Now if I was designing something requiring the input of two things that are exactly the same size, I'd save a lot of potential hassle by making just one slot, and giving that slot the ability to push things out again. Apparently attendant Alonso's cousin, designer Domingo, did not consider this option, and instead provided two identical slots side-by-side, one for the ticket, and one for the credit card. And only the credit card slot could spit anything back out.

Upon realising his mistake, Alonso attempted to extract Anthony's card with folded-up bits of paper, but to no avail. He opened the lid of the machine, but despite finding a rather interesting stash of various plastic cards, Anth's was not one of them. By this time we'd been at the toll booth for about 20 minutes, and were devising cruel and unusual yet highly appropriate punishments for both Alonso and Domingo. I'm sure you can too.

Eventually Alonso waved us on, but of course Anth had to cancel his card, and thus Amanda's too, just in case Alonso's other cousins, credit card fraudsters Carlos, Cesar and Fernando, got their mitts on the plastic. Bugger.