Right as we were passing Thessoloniki, we had some excitement. Specifically, the rear driver's side tire decided to go flat. It wasn't a blow-out - we never did figure out what caused it - but we were on a serious highway with the nearest exit about 5 km away. By that time, I figured the tire would be shredded and likely the car in bad shape. Fortunately, I found a small niche in the highway that gave us some protection from the high-speed traffic and set about figuring what to do.
I hadn't planned on commenting about the car, a 'SEAT Toledo', a 4-door automatic sedan (sample photo below). Hertz represents this class as being a 'Mercedes A class or similar'. I'd say the car more or less felt like a tin can with wheels and a go-kart engine. To get a third opinion I checked the web and found a car magazine that described the car as "The Seat Toledo makes a good case for itself as a no-nonsense family car, but don't expect any thrills."
We set about fixing the tire and I immediately discovered that the Toledo has some highly-attractive plastic covers on the lug nuts that are essentially impossible to get off. I find a tool that might be used for this purpose (a small nail-like thing), but it's clearly there for humor value. I hand this useless implement to Lauren to see if it'll make her laugh, while I call roadside service. I get someone on the line who clearly doesn't work for Hertz, but who is at least seemingly interested in helping us, starting with figuring out where we are. This is more challenging than you might think, as there are few exits on this highway and all I really know is the name of the highway (E75), the direction we're going (West) and that we just passed Thessoloniki, which by his lights is nowhere near enough. After about six minutes, he asks me for my number and says he'll call back in 3 minutes with help. We never hear from him again.
By this time, however, Lauren has imbued the useless tool with some sort of magic powers that now allows it to remove lug nut caps. I stand guard watching for oncoming traffic in the breakdown lane while she deftly removes all five caps. Then I offer to swap the tire while she stands guard, but she points out that I'm doing great at guard while she's done more tire changes than I, and more recently to boot. I briefly consider arguing the point, but quickly come to my senses and agree. Within 10 minutes, we've got a new tire in place, but we're never going to make it to Pella before 4pm closing time.
Instead, we decide to go back to the Thessaloniki airport to swap out this car for, ideally, something with at least 3 cylinders and a functional spare. A Mercedes A class would do nicely, although last time we did this trip in a Passat to great success.
When we get back to Hertz, we discover that returning a car with a flat tire is not standard for this location. They prefer to focus on exchanging cars for signatures or vice versa and sending people on their way. Problem #1 was that the tank wasn't full, which meant they'd have to do something involving credits or debits that was manifestly beyond their ken. They begged me to get it filled up ("5 minutes! No problems!"), and then said swapping would be no problem. After filling it up, we returned to a major conference of the various agents, the only words of which we could understand were "Passat". (I think they decided that giving us another joke car wasn't going to go well.)
Upshot: we now have a very nice diesel VW Passat that feels like a real car, and we're in our next AirBnB, a truly beautiful farmhouse owned by a lovely couple. More about them and this place in a future post.
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