Sunday, September 20, 2009

If Only I'd Thought Of It Earlier............

A few weeks ago, as documented in this blog post, we had a blowout in Tuscany.

Now that's not to say we had a slapup meal of spaghetti bolognese at some Italian version of Mrs. Miggins Pie Shoppe. Oh no, no, no. We actually had a right rear tyre blow out quite dramatically as we toddled along the autostrada from Rome at 130 kph.

In the course of getting ourselves back on the road and on with our tour of Northern Italy, we had several conversations with the lovely, helpful people at Budget Car Rental. If you detect some sarcasm there, you'd be right. We were pretty much left to our own devices.

At various times we had to tell different people on the other end of the phone our names, rental reference number, car make and model, location and so on even though we thought they should have had all that on record already. Well apart from our location I suppose. It all got very annoying after a while and we were wishing we had something different to tell them about the state of the car as we obviously weren't getting through to them that it couldn't be driven anymore.

Later that evening, once we were at the hotel and getting less stressed by the minute, I had one of those "I so wish I'd thought to say that at the time" moments. In fact I'll let you make up what I wish I'd said all by yourselves.

You really only need two facts :

1) Our tyre was totally shredded and the wheel rim was damaged so we were effectively down to having only 3 wheels.

2) The car was a Ford Focus Wagon.

I really hated to have let such a verbal golden opportunity pass but I consoled myself with the idea that we WERE in Italy and so it may all have been lost in translation anyway.

It helps me sleep at night.

4 comments:

  1. So THAT's why we were all singing "Higgetty Haggetty Hoggety Hi!" - - (only in Italian, of course). The New Christy Minstrels must have been psychic.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgWKBi_3EF0

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  2. Hahaha! I tell you what, you were damn lucky not to have any young children with you, weren't you? LOL!

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. ...You mean
    "Three wheels on my wagon but I'm still rolling along..
    Those Italian police they captured me
    But I'm singing a happy song..."

    Sing it!

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