Wasting our time
We spend a day at the garage
Today was a waste of time. We spent a day walking back and forth from the garage to a phone booth and an internet cafe to try to adjust our plans. It's very warm, and we aren't having fun.
The people at the garage are very friendly though, and keep telling us "no worries, mate!". We try not to, but we're not fully trained kiwi's yet, so there's a bit of worrying going on at times.
So, what happened to the car? The mechanic thinks the car is a piece of rubbish. He tells us that someone connected a piece of tubing to the automatic transmission that wasn't able to handle the high oil pressures that the transmission generates. So the tube died, the transmission fluid poured out and everything stopped working properly.
We tell the guy from Downtown Rentals that we have lost our confidence in the car or any other car he might want to give us (which he doesn't because he has no other cars available, but never mind). He admits that major work was done on the engine prior to us renting it, and that he might have overlooked something... Meanwhile, all other rental companies tell us that they have no cars available in Auckland. But they assure us that we won't have any trouble at all finding a car in Christchurch. But that's on the other side of the country, where we are supposed to arrive in four weeks time...The upshot of all this: Our rental company agrees to take the car back and refund us (will we ever actually get our refund? We don't want to worry about that for the moment). We drive back to Auckland Airport, we hand in the keys at a quarter to eight, we buy tickets at ten to eight and we're on a domestic flight to Christchurch at eight. We stay at the YMCA in Christchurch, after a long day...
