Friday's trip was no exception. Traffic standing still on most of the M roads - no place to get off - and no alternate route. Argh!!
We were finally able to get off the motorway and headed over the Saddleworth Moor on A635. It's a narrow road but as long as no one has an accident, it moves at a reasonable pace. (We've been on it when it wasn't moving at all.) So there we are on a narrow road traveling at 50 mph and the car started to sputter. "General System Fault - Restart" came up on the digital display. There was no place to pull over. You can't restart it while you're moving. All Mark could do was stop accelerating and hope that it sorted itself out. It didn't. The message continued to display until we were able to pull over and restart the car.
By the time the car (a Nissan Qashqai) decided to have another general system fault, we were in a busy intersection in Manchester. At least we were stopped so restarting wasn't too problematic. The next time it pulled that trick we were able to pull off onto a side street to restart the car. We felt lucky to get to the hotel. Who would have thought that someone would program a car to run on Windows!
As you might imagine, we were no longer very keen on driving this car. We called Hertz to come get it. They told us to call the roadside assistance number, which we did. After 20 minutes on hold (that pretty well ate up all the money on our pay as you go phone) they said that they weren't actually Hertz, but AA (the British equivalent of AAA). When we explained the problem, they said we'd have to call Hertz. They gave us a number that was supposed to be answered 24/7. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. Since we didn't need to drive anywhere, we decided to leave it until Saturday morning.
On Saturday morning, Hertz told us we'd need to drive the car over to the Manchester airport. We explained that we didn't think we wanted to drive a car that just cut out in the middle of an intersection and might provide us with opportunities to be T-boned. After much haggling, they agreed to send out a representative from Nissan to see what might be wrong with the car.
He showed up late Saturday afternoon. Apparently, it was an intermittent fuel-line fault. Apparently, this fault must be fairly well known to Nissan, and probably to Hertz. The fellow who came out to check it offered to take the car and Mark to the airport immediately to get another car. Unfortunately, if he'd done that he wouldn't have been back until past 10 PM, causing him to miss an evening with his son.
So we got to add sorting out the car to our list of drama to deal with on Sunday. Fortunately, except for the navigation system taking Mark to the wrong location, the exchange went fairly smoothly, which was good because we have enough drama dealing with the lost bag. When I said that I hoped this trip would help take my mind off losing Hefner, this was NOT what I had in mind.
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