Heathrow - London

Well, I haven't written anything in a while, and you may be wondering why. Well, it's a long story, but unfortunately, every piece of electronic equipment that I brought along on the trip was stolen. That includes even ipod and cell phone! Briefly, Gaffer and I had just arrived in the middle of Barcalona with the intention of returning the rental car when this guy on a moped told us at a stoplight that our tire was flat. Strange, we thought, but rolled up the window and decided to ignore him. Low and behold, our car started to clunk after the next light and there we were stranded on a major avenue of the city, wondering how to get hold of Avis, who's office was not far away. While doing this, another guy on a moped stopped and tried to get us to go to a nearby garage, but we cheefully told him that we would not need his services. While my attention was diverted, one of his collegues and snuck behind my back and stole the backpack holding all of my electronic equipment. Computer, all my backup photos, all the video I had taken, the video camera, the digital camera, cell phone, ipod...even my car keys and passport. He was long gone within the 60 seconds it took for me to realize that all was lost. A cop was over after a short while, but what could he do? Anyway, I'm over it now. We check into the hotel in Barcalona and on Monday I got a temporary passport. The one bit of good news is that much of the photo data of the trip is on a separate hard drive I brought along, which is kind of malfunctioning and which I hope to at least recover most of our trip. No one injured, no one hurt. I'm here at Heathrow, and will be stopping here for a couple of hours before getting back home.