Italian Fiasco

The next portion of our trip was slightly chaotic. Looking back on it now, it definitely made our trip more memorable but at the time it was not fun at all.

We left Rome very early in the morning, about 5:00am in order to make what was supposed to be a 15 hour drive back to Brussels, Belgium. Trisha and the kids took a nap for the morning portion of the drive. I was driving and enjoying the Italian countryside. It was looking to be a long, but good day in the car. That was until we got to Milan a few hours later. As we were transfering from one freeway to another on the outskirts of Milan, the clutch of the car stopped working again. It pushed down, but would not come out again. I immediately pulled over for fear of doing further damage to the car. The spot for pulling over was not ideal. There was nothing around, we had no cell phone to call anyone/business. I could see an emergency phone a few yards back on the highway, so I set out to get to it. I had to cross the four lane freeway and when I got to the phone it had been disabled. lame. We had no other options so I decided that we had to try and drive up a little further to the next pull out that had a phone. It turned out to not be that much further. I paged some Italian person from that phone and it told me someone would respond to our emergency soon. A few minutes later a tow truck pulled up to us and started getting the truck ready to tow us. I told him I just wanted help because we were in a rental car and the rental company had roadside assistance, so I just needed to get a hold of them. This guy would do nothing but tow our car and I didn't want to pay him to do that when I knew we could call the rental company and have them take care of us. So, once I refused to have him tow us, he got in his car and drove away and left us there on the side of the freeway.

We didn't know what to do. I went back to the phone and tried to call for the police to come but the phone would only page the tow companies to come get us. Finally after a while of trying to figure out what to do, Trisha was able to flag down a guy that let us use his phone and call the rental company. They told me that it would be about 45 minutes before they could get anyone out to our location (we had no idea where we were and it was hard to communicate a location to the person on the other side of the line). So the guy drove away and we sat in the car waiting. We waited about 40 minutes before we got nervous that no one was coming to help us. It made it much more stressfull because we had the two kids in the backseat of the car. We determined that we needed to try and flag down another person. So Trisha went out again (she was crutial because people stop for women) and flagged down another man who spoke some french and italian. He knew we had already called the rental company and they didn't show up so he tried to call the local rental company agency and the police. He couldn't get through to anyone for a while and once he got through to the local rental company offices they told him that in Italy they were pretty much not going to send any roadside assistance. I didn't understand why, but he told me in broken French that it wasn't going to happen. This guy was so nice to us. We had now been on the side of the road for probably 2 hours. This man tried to look at the car and see if he could figure out what was wrong. When he got in the driver's seat, he pushed in the clutch and it worked perfectly. So, I decided with him that he would lead us approximately 2 miles off of the freeway to the closest rental agency. We got in and said many prayers that the car would run for 2 miles. It did. We made it to the agency and to our astonishment and great disappointment, the office was closed for the month of August for vacation. Are you kidding me?! We were totally up a creek!!

After a few more minutes of major anxiety and stress. We said another prayer and decided to push the car to the closest rental agency that we could guarantee would be open- the Milan airport. We said a million silent and vocal prayers as we drove through the streets, around round-a-bouts and watched the odometer to mark the distance we had until we made it to safety. We made it to the airport!! And we could not have been more happy! I went up to the employees at the desk and explained to them what had happened and they were so friendly and nice to me. I told them that we wanted another car because there was no way we were driving this car anyfurther, let alone another 10 hours to Belgium. They were helpful but there was a lot of red tape they had to go through and we weren't sure they were going to be able to just trade us a car with a lot of international exchange fees. Finally, they found a car that we could trade straight across; a tiny Volkswagon. I was worried we wouldn't be able to fit our luggage into it but when they drove it up and it all fit, it was one more miracle added onto our list. I was also a little bit worried about the scratch on the side of the car we were leaving there but they never looked at it and never asked about it.

We were loaded off and we drove off with a new rental car. It was so relieving!! It felt so good to finally be on our way again and to know that we were not going to break down again. It was a 4 hour delay which meant that our arrival time in Brussels would now be 2:00am. We felt relieved again when we crossed back into Switzerland. Our car problems in Italy were not our favorite part of the trip, so to leave it behind felt good. We were able to continue our drive through all of the traffic jams in Switzerland (which added another hour to our travel time) and reach the French border. As soon as we had crossed into France, we stopped to get gas and dinner. I used this time to call the hotel that we had booked in Brussels and let them know of our really late arrival time. They told me there was no problem, they had our room reserved and they would expect us around 3:00am. Sweet!

We continued our drive through the North-East corner of France before finally hitting the Belgium border. Finally there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel. We made it to our hotel at the center of town in Brussels as estimated just before 3:00am. I went into the hotel and they pulled up my reservation. The man then proceeded to tell me that they had a computer glitch and had overbooked our size of rooms and they no longer had a room for us. I was off the wall pissed off!!! Are you for real right now?! I had even called them to make sure everything would be okay with our late arrival! I fought with them for about 10 minutes and begged them to just give me any room they had. They would not because they have really strick laws on how many guests you can have in each room in Europe. I begged more and more. I made sure they knew how upset I was, and I couldn't really control it because I was absolutely exhausted and stressed out already. After they refused all begging and told me the only option was for them to call all of the surrounding hotels and see if any had openings, I told them not to bother and to find me a room at their hotel near the airport. They did it. They gave us a free room, free meal tickets, free internet upgrades, everything they could. So back to the car I went to tell Trisha that we were not done. Another 30 minute drive to the airport before we could sleep. It was 4:00am when we finally got to our hotel and close to 5:00am by the time we hit the sack.

So a 15 hour day slowly turned into a long and brutal 24 hour day! Lucky for us, the kids did absolutely fantastic for the whole thing. We could not have asked for anything more from the kids. We were finally at our last destination and back to where we started 3 weeks earlier.