It was by no means the first time he'd had an experience somewhat similar. Back in 2007 when he had gone over to Gatineau where he owned a townhouse that he rented out, was the first time. He had arrived at the townhouse to ask the renters to give him the rent owing for the past several months. Their response was to physically overpower him -- he's a slight man, in his mid-60s back then -- duct tape him to a chair, and then remove his wallet, a chequebook, all his credit cards, and his car.

His car was retrieved by police, and the malefactors spent a year in prison for their little stunt. That experience, however, persuaded him that he didn't make a very good landlord and he soon afterward sold that property. And felt great relief overwhelm him that he no longer had to cope with renters and fixing up a property that had given him nothing but grief.

This time around it was a slightly different experience. Since breaking up with his wife fifteen years ago, and retiring, he had become a world traveller. Not on his own, mind, but on all manner of guided group tours, and he's been and seen just about everything, anywhere. This has been the main value of his life and his enthusiastic descriptions of all that he has been exposed to keeps us quite entertained from time to time.

He's setting out for Ecuador and Peru in the next three weeks. It's not that long since he returned from a trip to Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He loved the Adriatic, he adored Dubrovnik. It's when he arrived back in Canada that the episode occurred. He had stayed overnight before embarking on the trip, at his favourite Montreal jumping-off hotel, and he had parked his 2014 Lexus in their lot set aside for travellers wanting to leave their vehicles for the two or three weeks their holiday would take them away for.

The shuttle bus had taken him and others from the hotel to the parking lot to retrieve their vehicles, and his, with only 2200 kilometres of driving on it, was nowhere to be seen. Gone. Vanished.

Police informed him that his model vehicle was extremely popular with Montreal car-theft syndicates. It was, in fact, entirely possible that his car would end up in Croatia.

He didn't much care, though, other than for the nuisance-factor. His car was insured, was considerably less than a year old, and his insurance covered most of the cost of a new model, just released for 2015.