Driving Trauma

The Bottom Line
Carol arrived, sans luggage, and I was there to greet her as planned.  We drove home. Her luggage was delivered last night. All is well.

The Trauma (aka long story)

I made it to the train station in plenty of time to scope out the area before going to the car rental agency to get the car. Everything went smoothly. I have a new Fiat 500X. It is bigger than I anticipated, but it is a very nice car.

It was parked in the underground parking lot and I needed to exit the lot before Carol's train arrived as the agency was closing. Apparently, there is a taxi strike on in Porto, so I was able to park right in front of the station where taxis usually line up. Easy!

Except...

I'm used to a gear shift with Reverse in the bottom right, not in the top left where first gear usually is. And it has 6 gears instead of the 5 I'm used to. But still, it seems straightforward enough.

I put the car in gear and drive to the parking lot exit following the rental agency staff member who is going to scan something to open the gate and let me out.  It seems to be going fine. Then I head up the ramp, and the car slows, and loses power, and stalls. I think.  I'm about 2/3 of the way up.

I try to start the car again, but it seems to be already on. I release the clutch and try to move forward, but can't get any power. So, I coast back down the ramp. Fortunately, there is nobody behind me, because I then proceed to go up the ramp, stall, coast back down several times. I can smell that I'm burning something, tires? oil? This is not good. What the heck am I doing wrong? I am in panic mode now.

After several attempts, the parking lot attendant, who has been observing all of this, comes over to help. He comments on the smell of something burning and the car not getting power. "What am I doing wrong?" I ask. I point to the gear shift and say "I'm putting it in first gear. This is first gear, right?" He comes around and sits in the passenger seat and explains to me that to get into reverse, you need to pull up on the buttons underneath the ball of the gear stick and move the stick to the far top left and that first gear is in it's usual place. So, I've been trying to go up the ramp in third gear! And because the car has some kind of fancy starting mechanism, I can actually go from neutral to third (on flat ground) and the car won't stall or even complain!

Once I have the car in first gear, I easily climb the ramp and exit the parking lot. (Thank you Parking Lot Angel!) I start to breathe again - and then I stop. I am not where I expect to be. I am emerging into a flow of traffic and I'm not sure where I need to go. I'm entering a round-about. I go around it a couple of times. I can see the station and where I want to be but I'm not sure how to get there as the road directly in front is a one-way.

Thankfully, in scoping out the area earlier, I had discovered the one-way and had figured out the traffic flow for exiting the station. So, I decided just to drive around and come along the one-way making it possible to take a right turn into the station parking lot and park. Ok. NOW I can breathe! I'm shaking. I'm confused. But I'm breathing.

I have a few minutes before Carol's train arrives so I figure this would be a good time to orient myself to the car.  Everything is in Portuguese. I try to find the setting to turn on English but I can't find it. I try to set up the navigation for the directions home, but can't figure it out. I give up and go in to meet Carol.

How lovely to see a friendly familiar face! But she has no suitcase. It didn't arrive and she had her own adventures in Lisbon trying to track it. I'm anxious to get on the road and avoid driving in the dark so we don't waste much time getting on our way. Carol uses Google Maps on my phone to direct us. We have to drive all the way through the city to get to the highway we need. Not surprisingly, we miss a turn off and have to double back and then miss it again. I love how Google Maps just 'recalculates' without any judgement. We eventually are on the right highway and are on our way.

The rest is nerve-wracking but relatively uneventful. We stopped at the local grocery store for Carol to buy some overnight supplies, picked up a "take-away" supper and arrived home in the dark. (I drove with just driving lights for a while because I couldn't find the control for the lights!)

Yesterday, I was still traumatized and refused to even go near the car until late afternoon. I perused the owner's manual online to warm me up then Carol and I finally went and sat in the car and played with all the settings. We have it showing and speaking English now. I know how to use the wipers and the lights, but the fine points of the navigation system still elude us. We went for a drive to the beach and then wanted to go the a larger grocery store.  The navigation system had us going through a maze of narrow (and I mean so narrow that if we had stopped we would not have been able to open the doors wide enough to get out of the car narrow!) winding roads. Eventually it happily announced that we had arrived at our destination - another narrow cobblestone road into nowhere!

Google Maps on the phone got us back home and will be our guide in the future.