A right dog’s dinner!

I’m referring to my drive down to Spain yesterday to pick up the engine for my Kia Sportage. And it started with so much promise. I got up just before 6.00 am and was on the road and raring to go by 6.45 am, just as I hoped that I would be. But things began working against me almost immediately, mainly because I made a wrong decision.

When I drove down last Friday, I took the longer, quicker route, which sticks to the autoroutes so is quicker even though it involves driving a longer distance. But because you rack up the tolls, it works out to be more expensive than if you take the cross-country route, which is almost toll free. Working against the latter, though, is that the roads have lower speed limits, so progress is much slower, and progress can become very slow indeed if you get stuck behind a stream of heavy goods vehicles.

As usual I was using my satnav which is great for planning a route from A to B but if you want to insert waypoints, problems start to arise because you can only enter latitude/longitude coordinates or ‘city centres’. Obviously the latter are the last thing you need if you are looking for a quick cross-country journey, so if you use them as waypoints, you either have to key in a revised plan as you are approaching them or just find a route yourself that skirts around them.

The trouble with the latter, though, is that the satnav keeps the city centre that you’re trying to avoid in its memory and then becomes hell-bent on getting you there using every available opportunity to do so including keep telling you to turn round, so not ideal. The only way that I know to get around this is to keep entering new destinations into the satnav while you’re driving which is inconvenient but at least works.

When I initially checked the tiny map on my satnav’s screen when I worked out my cross-country route, it appeared to know a route to Mont-de-Marsan in the Landes that I was unaware of, starting from around the Sarlat area, so I headed initially for Sarlat. The route that I would have taken would have been via a roundabout that takes you up to Bergerac airport, except you keep going straight on for Mont-de-Marsan, and you definitely do not get there via Sarlat in any way shape or form.

It turned out that this was the way that the satnav also knew and by the time that I’d caught the morning rush-hour in Sarlat complete with all the school buses turning into the college there I eventually arrived at the said roundabout a good hour later than if I’d just driven directly there myself. So that was error number one.

It then turned out that the Mont-de-Marsan cross country route is much favoured by all the French, Spanish and Portuguese heavy goods vehicles heading for the Iberian peninsula that are in no hurry and want to stay off the autoroutes. This, of course, does no favours for people like me who are in a hurry and after a while it became obvious that with my rate of progress, I’d be unable to get to my destination near San Sebastian before 1.00 pm before the yard closed for two hours for lunch.

So I took the decision to get onto the relevant autoroute in order to beat that deadline with the result that I would then be getting the worst of both worlds – a slow cross-country route PLUS en-route tolls, although really I had no choice. But if that was bad enough, even worse was to come.

The C-Max was performing beautifully just as it had done a few days previously, giving brisk performance with its cruise control and also incredibly good fuel economy. Eventually I arrived at a ‘payage’ at a place called Sames in the French Basque country and pulled up to pay using my bank card as usual. However, on this occasion the C-Max’s engine stopped and after I’d paid and the barrier had risen, it refused to restart.

I paused with my hazard flashers on and tried several more times over a few minutes but without success, leaving me with no choice but to contact the autoroute emergency staff who arranged for a breakdown truck to come and take me off the motorway. I couldn’t believe that I was involved in yet another breakdown nightmare, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t find my mobile phone and thought that I’d left it at home when I’d departed in the early morning.

In fact, I found it hours later in the car where it had flown off the front seat and hidden itself when I’d been forced to brake heavily earlier in the journey, but by then matters had resolved themselves. At the time I felt that I was under attack from all sides and not having my phone with me, as I thought, made me feel even more vulnerable than I already did, with the difficult situation that I was facing.

The breakdown truck arrived after 30 minutes or so and after loading me and the C-Max, we trundled off to a local garage about 30 minutes or so away. After unloading the C-Max he then fiddled around under the bonnet and didn’t do anything really but miracle of miracles, the engine eventually started.

I told him that I had roadside assistance through my insurance company (the same one who’d helped out when the Kia let me down) and after going off armed with the information, he returned with the news that they’d be picking up the transport bill and I had nothing to pay, so I was free to resume my journey.

The C-Max seemed totally unchanged and I had no choice but to rejoin the autoroute as by now time was ticking away. There was now no chance that I’d be able to make the breaker’s yard in Spain before it closed for their lunch break at 1.00 pm and the best that I could hope for was to arrive as they re-opened at 3.00 pm. So with this in mind, I carried on heading south-west and eventually stopped at a pleasant parking area to consume the lunch that I’d prepared and taken with me.

To make matters even worse, the journey up to that point had been dogged by thick patchy fog but by the time I’d stopped, the sun has broken through and the morning was becoming pleasantly warm. It stayed like that from then on as I entered Spain and arrived at the breaker’s yard, Desguaces Vidaurreta SL, almost dead on 3.00 pm. But to add insult to injury, the tolls that I’d incurred for this nightmarish, slow cross country route were higher than I’d paid previously when I did the same journey on the ‘fast’ route a few days before.

Unlike when I was last there, the enormous metal gate into the yard was open and I was amazed at what I saw. I already knew from checking it out on Google Earth that this is not your average local messy car breakers yard. It extends over several hectares, has late model vehicles stacked four high on metal storage racks and is scrupulously clean.

The parts store containing thousands of items is a huge multi-level warehouse and is manned by staff with computer terminals much like any car main dealer’s parts department, except all of the items sold to a steady stream of customers while I was there come off the shelf but are in perfect used condition.

With what I was seeing, I had few reservations from then on about buying the engine for the Kia from them and when my turn came went up to the counter with copies of the engine details, my email correspondence and my proof of payment. I asked if anyone spoke English or French and one guy said that he spoke a little English, so he became my contact. He took my papers and said that he’d go and find out what was happening with the engine and returned after a few minutes saying that there was just one problem. It was still in the donor vehicle.

By then it was getting on for 3.30 pm. He asked if I could come back another time but I said that this was not possible and surely they could get it out in a couple of hours. He agreed, so I said that I’d be back at about 5.30 pm and went off to have a doze in my car. When I returned at about 5.20 pm he said that they’d need another 10 minutes and bought me a coffe, which was very welcome. It was 6.00 pm when we eventually loaded the engine into the back of the C-Max and I was ready to commence my return journey – this time via the ‘long, fast’ route.

Here are some shots that I took of the engine in the C-Max before I left Spain.

And here are some shots that I took outside my house this morning before I drove over to my mechanic’s premises where we onloaded it without too many problems.

But this isn’t the end of the story as my trials and tribulations persisted right up until I arrived home again last night at about 11.15 pm. On the way I had to stop at several more ‘payages’ to pay tolls and at one of them the C-Max’s engine stopped again and wouldn’t restart. I switched the hazard flashers on again in deepening despair as this time there was no obvious emergency button to press, although presumably there must have been one somewhere.

Luckily, this time the engine did restart after a few minutes and the C-Max then continued to peform just as before although I felt as though I had egg shells under my throttle foot the whole way home from that point on. I told my mechanic today what had happened and after unloading the Kia engine, he checked to see if the C-Max was showing any fault codes. And indeed it was – low injector pressure, which presumably accounted for the problem.

He said that this is not uncommon with Ford engines and is usually related to a fuel filter problem which is neither expensive nor complicated. I said that I wanted him to give the car a general service in any case having only just acquired it, so hopefully if it keeps going without letting me down he’ll be able to deal with it then.

But what a total dog’s dinner a simple drive down to Spain had become and I have to confess that I’m getting a little bit annoyed and fed up with how even the most simple things keep turning into raging crises. Hopefully as is always the case, in time ‘all things must pass’ but that moment can’t come soon enough for me 🙁