Car Trouble

Last time I posted I hinted at our recent catastrophic automotive failure. RIP, our little red Clio. Consequently for the last week or so my family and I have lived a life very similar to when we first moved out here and have been without a car. I remember back then that it was expensive and inconvenient using taxis, buses and trains to get around. The afternoon school run was for me an absolute pain in the backside, although the kids seemed to find the bus trips through the narrow twisty streets of Amoreira most amusing. So anyway, we had to get a car. Luckily a colleague of my wife was selling what was to become our beloved Renault Clio. It was an old banger, but it was cheap. And let me tell you that cars out here are very expensive. Very very expensive. So we thought ourselves quite fortunate to have landed our little red car for what in retrospect was only a handful of notes. But there were problems. It overheated. The fan didn't seem to work and it just got far too hot, even on short journeys. One of the first tourist places we visited in our little car was Sintra. And of course the little light on the dashboard came on, luckily just as we were driving into the outskirts of town. We were forced to park up and walk the rest of the way into Sintra to try to enjoy our day out in the hope that when we returned to the Clio that it would have cooled down sufficiently to get us home safely. And so that was the start of a boisterous relationship with the Clio. It had it's niggles and we learnt to live with them. We coped, keeping a very close eye on the water level on almost a daily basis. And in return for this extra love and attention it made sure to get us to the supermarket and back and do the school runs. When the radio mysteriously stopped working we didn't get disheartened. And when the back lights failed we didn't panic. We took it in our stride and sought a reputable mechanic. And all was well until last week...

My wife had spent the weekend in England and I was on the way to the airport to pick her up. The first sign of trouble happened when I had to stop at the toll booth in San Domingos de Rana and upon pulling away I stalled the car. I though nothing of it at the time. Then 15 minutes later as I was pulling up to the ticket machine at the airport car park I realised that the car was juddering somewhat. Never-the-less, I had a job to do and so I parked the car and went into the airport arrivals lounge. The children and I waited, played "Simon Says" and watched the updates on the arrivals board. A little later than expected my wife appeared through the large glass doors with a relieved smile upon her face, clearly glad that the flight was over and she'd landed on friendly soil. That smile wasn't destined to last long however as on returning to the car it failed to start. I was more than a little worried that I'd need to have the thing towed out of the carpark and pay some kind of enormous fee to get it home, when thankfully, on the fifth or sixth attempt, it started. As if to add insult to injury, we were half way home when a very familiar little light on the dashboard lit up indicating that the engine was overheating and so I pulled into the services near Carcavelos and raised the lid to let it cool down. Most Portuguese motorway services seem to have a small children's play area and so there we sat, my wife and I, watching our children playing on the slide and the swings, both of us wondering once more if the poorly beast would start again once it had cooled. Thankfully, it did and got us home. In fact, the following day it started twice more allowing us to get to the supermarket and back again, but alas, that was the end. The little darling Clio had drawn her final fatal and most terminal breath.

The little red car still sits outside our house, waiting to be scrapped. Unfortunately scrapping a car here isn't easy. Or at least not as easy as you'd think. You have to get it scrapped at a proper licenced scrap yard and have it formally de-registered, and apparently, failing to follow the proper procedure here could result in us having to pay a substantial fine. And so it sits there, waiting. We've been too busy looking for a replacement car to do anything about it. More importantly, I've currently no idea where to go to get it de-registered properly and I've no idea where a suitably licensed scrapyard is either. Jobs for next week I think. The good news I suppose is that we are due to make the transaction on a shiny new (well, okay, second-hand) motor this coming weekend, and so with luck, the dead Clio can finally go to the great scrapyard in the sky. But only after I've syphoned the tank of every last drop of fuel.