An Unfortunate Incident

Ok, so that's not our car - but we have been having some car troubles that are putting a bit of a dampener on our already very damp time in Northern Spain.

Way back in the French Pyrenees we had an incident with our car where the power steering suddenly stopped working and it beeped and flashed at us: Panne de la Direction. Seeing as we don't speak French, we did what all English speaking travellers in France do when faced with a foreign language, we ignored it, restarted our car and kept going (oh, I can see my parents wincing).

When it happened again in Andorra, our French wasn't any better. When it happened driving down a mountain in San Sebastian I had the ingenious idea of looking in our phrasebook. It turns out that 'panne' actually means breakdown! Yet, acting like the intelligent, well-educated people we are, the word BREAKDOWN flashing in red in front of our eyes was not sufficient for us to get ourselves and our car to a mechanic.

Finally, in Santiago del Compostela just restarting the car no longer works. The red flashing and beeping will not go away and the lack of power steering makes driving and parking here very difficult. So we bit the bullet and called Renault, who put us in touch with a very Spanish speaking mechanic this morning. After following him back to the workshop, he plugged our car into a computer (the wonders) and promptly informed us it was broken! Thank God he cleared that up!

Three hours later, after much sitting around and arguing with the head office in Paris we finally resolved the situation. The solution proposed to us was that we would stay in (cold, wet) Santiago until they recieved the necessary part and fixed our car in four days. Instead, we're driving to Porto tomorrow, where our car will be fixed whilst we explore Northern Portugal in a rental car.

Much kudos goes to Josh and his language skills saving the day by being able to communicate in German(!) with one of the Renault mechanics.