Did I say you couldn't make this up.....? It gets better!
The truck is sorted. We however are not. We're in Valencia and need to get back to the UK - me, my wife and our dog who is greater than 10kg (hugely relevant - hold on!). Easy you'd think, right - there's buses, trains, planes, hire-cars, taxis.....? Well no actually. Any dog greater than 10kg is excluded from all of them, and I mean rigidly, categorically no way, even with bribes! The Spanish really have got it in for any dog greater than 10kg. Would they actually check the weight - probably not, but they have conditions such as must travel in a box of certain dimension etc. Also, our dog is 35kg so not really an option to try it on. We are effectively, stranded.
Now if we could just get across the border to France - a mere stones throw away in relative terms, we'd have no issue. The French allow all dogs on everything. Hire a car and don't tell them....? Yep, that is the only option but here's the rub. To take a hire car from Spain, one way across a border, incurs a hefty £400ish surcharge!!! It doesn't matter if the hire is all the way to Cherbourg or just across the border, one day or five days, the surcharge is the same. It appears we have no choice it but it really is salt in the wound. I though it'd be sorting the truck that would be hard but that now appears to have been the easy bit. I guess it may seem like small change in the grand scale of things but actually when you add it all up its a lot, so much so that every pound hurts.
Lesson learned and all that, always get repatriation cover....? Actually even that isn't so simple. Sure if we'd had it the truck would get home but it turns out our dog would still have caused issues. Also, the company that the AA uses to repatriate told us that they wouldn't have been able to transport a truck of our size for 2-3 weeks. The AA doesn't make you aware of that!
Oh well, updates to follow.