Okay I am back and survived my first day of work..however I need to finish our adventures in the UK. Wednesday I was to do another workshop but Su was not keen on me driving down to Reading and back so I had to cancel it....sorry no more pics for now. Anyhow Wednesday was spent packing and cleaning up our house swap residence. We had booked accommodation at Hemel Hempstead for Thursday night having decided not to drive down early Friday morning for our 10 am flight. There was a threat of snow and I felt driving in the dark with possible snow was chancing it.
We set of Thursday morning to go to Robin Hood Airport to pick up our Hertz rent-a-car. There was heavy ice near the airport and police were cautioning drivers to slow down as there had been one accident on the airport roundabout already. The staff at Hertz were friendly and we had a Ford Cmax Diesel People mover. Looked just right to fit all our cases and it was automatic!
We loaded up our cases and about 11.15 after saying goodbye to Pauline and Phil we left retford heading to Hemel Hempstead. Our trip was going well until a warning light and message came up on the dash...Engine Malfunction! Okay so what does that mean? I pulled over on the A1 switched off and rested awhile. I restarted the engine no warning message..great. However a few kilometres down the road..once again Engine Malfunction! I decided to head to a nearby homemaker centre figuring it was better than being on the side of the road. The area was known as Biggleswade. I immediately decided to phone the Hertz breakdown assistance. This is handled by the AA and because I was calling from my Australian Mobile they would not take my number estimated time someone would get to us 2.40pm it was now 1.20pm. Luckily where I had stopped the Homebase store had a toilet and there was two food vans in the car park. At 2.30 I decided to phone Breakdown to see how far away our rescue was, I waited on hold whilst they made inquiries...about 15 minutes away. Just after 3pm a Dual cab recovery vehicle arrived. He was contracted to AA however could not touch the vehicle due to it being a rental vehicle and the fact it was still under manufacturers warranty. Now the fun began..I contacted Hertz Customer service which is a call centre in Dublin. They were of no assitance and did not really know where Biggleswade was. I decided to call Hertz Doncaster, Natlie was quite helpful and told me to leave it with her. Fifteen minutes later she contacted me to say the AA would be with us not a contractor. We let the contractor go and luckily within 15 minutes the AA recovery truck arrived.
Our problems however were not solved, he was going to take us back to Doncaster It was now 4 pm getting dark and cold setting in. I then rang the call centre for Hertz who gave me Wellin Gardens to ring. I rang Welwyn Gardens Hertz as well as the Heathrow office. In both cases I had to leave a message. Ten minutes later Mark from Welwyn Gardens called can we go to Luton airport and pick up another car? Okay sounds good. The AA recovery driver then had to contact his powers to bet to get approval. After some too-ing an fro-ing we had the Car on the back of the truck and us all riding up in the cab on the way to Luton Airport. At Luton they had a VW Passat wagon but soon discovered it did not have the luggage room so we were placed in a CMax Galaxy. I managed to get a free GPS as I had no idea where I was. At 6.30 we finally arrived at our Hotel. I was worn out and we had not even started our flight home. Lucky we decided against driving down early in the morning of our flight. Now Adam says I should have kept driving but I was concerned if further damage occurred would I be blamed and worse what if we got stuck on the M25? I will fill you in on more details in my next post.
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