Stories We Haven't Been Able to Tell: Car Battery

Surely any road trip involving over 7,000 miles, a dozen countries, a number of mountains and a 14 year old car is bound to have some tales of mechanical woe, right? This is ours (the only one, oddly enough!).

So remember that noise most cars make when you leave the lights on? The noise in our Saxo is more of an optional set up, sometimes it plays a great little dance number (much more sophisticated than a simple beep), sometimes nothing, and never in response to the driver's door, only the passanger's. Even this isn't really a problem because you normally notice when your lights are on, so we weren't overly concerned about this. And then we started going to countries that require lights on all the time, like Albania.

Read the rest of the sad, sad tale...

What happened was this. We left our lights on one day during a stop at an Albanian town called Kruje. We had been out seeing what passed for a tourist destination in Albania (interesting but not the most worthwhile thing I've ever seen) and returned to a dead battery. Someone came over to demand money for parking where we'd parked, so we instead asked him for help. He only speaks Albania and recruits two other guys who look at me with bewilderment as I try to indicate in English, piecemeal italian, and alot of hand gestures that the battery is dead, and we need a jump. They recommend popping the clutch and even offer to do it for us. "Great!" we respond. One of the guys hops in the car and is ever so slowly gliding down the hill (at least the town was perched on a steep one). It is only then we realize that Meg's purse, which holds all our money and passports, is inside the car... leaving us with nothing.

After the longest 10 minutes of my life the guy finally returns without the car. Turns out he never got it to start because the road turned to a one-way the opposite direction, and it is now parked further down the street. So we all trudge down to see what there is to do, wherein a mechanic, dressed in full 70's mechanic get-up, is suddenly found who begins looking at the car, while I go back into my English/Italian/hand waving routine. We're still not sure why it took them so long to figure out that we were the idiots who caused the problem, and a fairly simple, straight-forward problem at that. At this point we've started to draw a small crowd, all of us watching the mechanic poke and prod the engine.

Eventually, a conversation begins, and the Albanians agree on what is to be done. When we try and inquire as to what is going to happen to our car battery that they are hastily removing (did we mention that Albania is a final destination for most stolen cars in Europe?), we are told to calm down, it'll all alright.

Eventually, they find a man dressed in a spotless white shirt and have him take out his battery. They use that battery to start our car and then swap ours back in after it's running. After it's all in and the car is finally working, they show us in Italian where the oil goes, how to meause it, where the windshield/windscreen fluid goes etc... all because we forgot to turn the lights off. It ended up not costing us anything and provided a nice little moment of theatre in an otherwise calm city... but it still had some moments of panic.