The Little Hyundai That Could

In response to a recent post by Jenn, I was inspired to share with you the following story, my favorite one from my 4 months abroad during college:

We arrived in Spain for our program nearly a month before actual classes started. We spent some time in Madrid, then made our way to Granada for a week of classes designed to prepare us for a type of “placement exam” we had to take to determine which courses we were qualified to enroll in while we were there. After this exam, we had 5 days off before classes finally began.

Many of the program participants planned to use those 5 days as an opportunity to travel. There were basically two trips forming, one to Morocco and another to Lagos, Portugal. I thought the beach sounded like fun, even if it was January, and committed myself to the Lagos trip.

There ended up being 8 of us who decided to go to Portugal, 2 guys and 6 girls. It was decided that we would rent two cars and that everyone would pack light, since cars in Europe are tiny and we would be stuffing them to the gills just to get all 8 of us in them. When I say we packed light, I’m not kidding. Thank God someone was wise enough to bring a bottle of Febreze, because we used up the entire thing in the 5 days we were away.

But I digress. We rented 2 cars with standard transmission, as it was much cheaper than paying for an automatic, but this limited our driver pool to Adam, who drove a stick at home, and Ben, who sort of knew how to drive a stick, kind of, he’d done it once or twice. On the day we were set to leave, the girls assembled at the designated meeting spot. Adam showed up in a little god Peugeot and Ben was nowhere in sight. Apparently he’d stalled a few times getting the thing out of the garage, but Adam felt confident he would work it out on his way over. We waited about 10 more minutes and Ben finally made it in a tiny white Hyundai.

We loaded up into the 2 cars, cramming our backpacks into the itty bitty trunks, and left Granada. I rode with Ben, who seemed to have the stick shift thing pretty under control at that point. It didn’t take long, however, to discover that the 4 of us and our luggage were a little much for the poor Hyundai’s engine. We would literally have to use our momentum from going down one hill to make it up the next one. We’re talking 70-80 km an hour, pedal to the metal the whole way. We nicknamed her The Little Hyundai That Could. Adam’s car was subsequently named Gold Lighting.

We made our way smoothly (if a little slowly) to Sevilla, where we decided to stop for lunch, then managed to navigate our way back to the highway thanks to Adam’s internal GPS, because when we looked at the maps we had, we realized we had no detailed map of Sevilla. Oops.

From Sevilla we continued along with no problems until right after we crossed the border into Portugal, where Ben looked down and realized that we needed gas. We signaled to Gold Lightning our need for a pit stop and pulled into the first gas station we saw.

Now there are a few things you should know at this point in the story:

1. You are not required to have an international drivers license to rent a car in Spain, but you are supposed to have one to drive a car in Portugal.
2. While Portuguese looks enough like Spanish to make it familiar, it sounds nothing like Spanish. We all spoke Spanish. None of us spoke Portuguese.
3. We all had cell phones, but they ceased to work as soon as we crossed over the border.

So we pull into this gas station and the girls pile out of the cars to go check out the store while the guys stay out and tend to the cars. Gold Lightening is not in need of a fill-up, as she runs on diesel gasoline. The Little Hyundai That Could, however, took regular gas, and she was working herself ragged, bless her heart.

I come out of the store to see Ben and Ana standing there sloooowly feeding gas into the tank because the nozzle will not fit into the tank. Which should have been our first clue, but we’re in a foreign country damnit, and we have no idea what’s “normal.”

We get about an eighth of a tank of gas in the car before the little guy that was attending the store comes running outside waving his hands and going “No! No! No! No! No!”

That word’s universal.

He manages to communicate to us via some cryptic combination of gestures/Portuguese/Spanish/English that we are putting diesel gasoline into a car that does not use diesel gas. As Ben so eloquently put it, who knew “gasoleo” meant diesel?!

We fill up the rest of the car with regular gas and get back in. Everyone is a little bit terrified to try and start the car in the event that it 1) explodes (admittedly an irrational fear) or 2) doesn’t start. Ben turns the key, it jumps to life, no one dies. WIN.

We pull out of the gas station with Gold Lightening in the lead and get about a mile down the road before Ben is pushing the accelerator to the floor and the car is slowing down…

We’re nearly to a stop on the highway when it suddenly kicks back to life and we begin accelerating again. This happens…6, maybe 7 times? and then she seems to have it out of her system. We chug right along until we get to our hostel in Lagos, where we park the car in a garage and don’t move it for 5 days.

I later found out from my friend Amy that at one point Adam looked in the rearview mirror and when we weren’t there, started to freak out. Amy said she started laughing her ass off and Adam looked at her and said “Don’t laugh! We’re fucked!”

So our 5 lovely days in Lagos are up, and it’s time to pile back into our rented automobiles and drive back to Granada. Ana, Amy, Ben and I climb into The Little Hyundai That Could. Ben turns the key and she starts after a few seconds of grumbling. He puts the car in reverse, gives it some gas. We get about a foot out of the parking space and she dies. Ben turns the key again. Car starts. Another foot. Dead.

This goes on for about 10 more tries. Ben just keeps turning the key because this car HAS TO GET US HOME. There is no other option. We don’t speak Portuguese, we don’t have phones, we don’t have enough money to take a bus, even if there was one, and there is no way we are getting all 8 of us in one car. It just has to work. There is no other option.

After the 10th try, she kicks back to life and we make it the rest of the way out of the parking space, out of the garage and halfway up a hill before she dies. Again. So now you have 3 girls behind this car trying to push it up a hill because the only guy in the car is also the only person who can drive it. Another car drives up behind us and 2 guys get out to help us push.

She kicks back to life and the 3 of us go running after the car and jump in while it’s still moving because we don’t want to have to stop in case it dies again. We are laughing our asses off the entire time, not so much because it’s funny (which it is in hindsight but was not at the time) but because we are nearly hysterical with panic. We manage to get back into the car, coast the wrong way down a one way street back out onto the main road and onto the highway.

Where she proceeds to nearly die and then kick back to life at the last second 4 or 5 more times before we’re chugging along, just like before.

We got about 50 kilometers from Granada when it became apparent that there was no way we were going to make it back without stopping for gas again. We all said a few Hail Marys and some Our Fathers (when in Rome…) or whatever as Ben turned the key and she started up no problem. She didn’t even nearly die a few times!

So we get back to the hotel where the rental car desk is located and I get elected to go in and return the keys because “my Spanish is the best.” I discover that there is noone at the desk and am told by the hotel staff that they’ve gone to the airport to drop off a car and I should just call them and ask them what to do with the cars and the keys.

Here’s the thing about speaking Spanish to a native speaker over the phone. It’s about 100x harder than speaking it in person because they cannot see your “Sweet Jesus I have no idea what you just said!” face and they refuse to slow down and enunciate. So it takes me about 10 “mas despacio por favors” before I manage to decipher that we should just leave the cars parked out front and put the keys on the chair behind the rental car desk.

And that’s what we did. We completely destroyed the engine on that Hyundai and never heard another word about it. I kid you not.

So there you have it, my friends. The Adventures of The Little Hyundai That Could.