in the early 1970's As a typical dumb young mother in my early 30's, I never had much interest in "politics" and didn't see any way "politics" might affect me. DH was stationed in Italy with us, his family and we decided to take a drive and go vacation in General Franco's backyard. We got there and were camping when we young folks decided we would sneak off and go skinny dipping at 1am after the kids were asleep. DH and I got to just before the beach and were shocked when we saw a pair of Franco's machine gun armed soldiers patrolling the beach of the campground and immediately decided we'd find something else to do instead.

There is actually more to the story. One BIG reason we did not want to tangle with the officials is that we had heard on the radio just before we got to Spain that a last case of small pox had been just discovered in Spain. They were all panic stricken and overwrought on the radio broadcast. Unfortunately, TWO of my three kids had just then (way after we left home) broken out with Chickenpox from their sister who had had it a few weeks before. We did not want to tangle with ignorant, overreacting Spanish border officials whom we were sure would not know the difference between chickenpox and smallpox, so we snuck through the border after dark with the kids all covered up, sleeping in the back of the van. We chose a campsite way away from any other campers and kept to ourselves and didn't need any soldiers looking at our kids right then.