Adventures of a rental car

We rented a car for most of our trip. It was a sleek four-door that even had a USB slot so I could plug in my I-pod! One of the main reasons was so we could drive down the "Romantic Road" stopping at the little Bavarian villages along the way and taking in the beautiful scenery at our own pace.  This turned out to be a wonderful idea...and more difficult than the time we rented a car in Ireland where we drove in the right side of the car on the left side of the road!  We are so glad we had a car but had a few hiccups along the way.

Getting to Heidelberg was easy and we were rewarded by sunshine, an old bridge, a castle and some "Weissbier."  

About 20 km from Heidelberg Nate discovered there was a problem with the clutch.  It wouldn't go in reverse at all and wasn't catching well in other gears, plus the engine was starting to smell as a result of the clutch problems.  We couldn't continue like this.  Thankfully we had a pay by the minute cell phone that works in Europe.  We called our car rental agency, explained our problem and promptly got put on hold.  We anxiously let the pay-by-the minute minutes go by and were dismayed to then get disconnected.  Two phone calls later plus another disconnection we finally asked a nice German man to speak to customer service for us.  Whatever he said convinced them that we actually needed help.  45 minutes went by and a man who spoke ONLY German arrived from the rental place.  Pointing and gesturing gave him the info he needed, he grabbed a tool and 10 minutes later our car was good to go!  Since we had imagined being stranded in a little town 1 1/2 hours away from our next destination a 3 hour delay was not the worst that could have happened to us.

   
            

As I said, we loved having a car because we got to drive down the Romantic Road.  We quickly discovered that this was not a "road" per se, but a "route" that took us through specific cities.  This meant that we could not plug this route into our GPS, MEANING we had to look for signs which told us where to go.  These signs say "Romantische Straße" and we had to constantly be on the lookout to make sure we did not miss a turn.  We took to shouting excitedly each time we found the next sign..."Romantische Straße!!" pronounced in our goofy American way "Romantic Straw-bey!"

We mostly did a good job of following these signs except the time we went 30ish km west instead of south and the times we came across signs like this,

which mean "you can't actually go on this road you were planning to go on but we won't give you suggestions of other ways to go, except the opposite direction. " 

Almost getting stuck with our car in a parking garage, a small bump into concrete, (no scratch!) another person bumping our parked car when we were gone (a scratch!) and some minor major GPS misinformation were a few other difficulties we faced.  Other than that, having a car was totally worth it for the sights we saw and as easy as pie!