At the Opel Dealer
We took a seat at the Opel garage whilst the mechanic checked the car. The first questions were, was it under warranty? Was the autogas system under warranty?
The answers to both we thought was 'no' at the time. Anyway, they blamed the later installation of auto gas for the breakdown.
They told us that they could not obtain spares for a few days and that the car would take 2 weeks to fix.
We had to wait about 4 hours for Green Flag to make their assessment of how to get us home again. We were asked whether we had a credit card and told to pay for travel en-route claim it back later. The lady on the other end of the line told us to go and find somewhere for lunch and she would call later. The problem now was that my mobile was running out of power and I did not have any means of recharging it, although at that point they had the phone number of the garage.
Whilst we were having lunch in the Grunberg town centre (lovely town with numerous timber-framed buildings) we received a call letting us know that Green Flag had managed to arrange car hire for us and that someone would collect us and take us there (a friend of the Opel dealer).
The Green Flag adminstrator also told us that the Garage had informed them that it would cost 2,700 Euros for the repair. At the time of writing, it is equivalent to pounds Sterling.
Back we went to the Opel dealership where we sorted out the belongings we could carry, gave all the fresh food we had bought in Poland (such as apples, nuts) and bringing back to the UK to the garage staff, got in the car to go to the car hire place.
At the Europcar Hire office in Giessen we discovered that the only car available was a massive 9 seater which would cost 600 Euros to get to Calais. Very reluctantly my husband signed the agreement and the assistant went to fetch the car. Once he brought it round and we saw the size of the thing we asked to cancel the agreement. Neither of us felt comfortable driving something that large with gears on the other side. Europcar were very good about cancelling without any cost.
By now my mobile was out of battery. We decided that we would make our own way back by train and asked our driver to drop us off at Giessen Railway Station, which he did. |
The town hall in Grünberg
We queued up in the station ticket office to buy a ticket back home to England. The first ticket clerk we got understood a lot of English and we tried to get a ticket to Wickford in Essex. He couldn't obtain a price for a ticket to Wickford and passed us on to his female colleague who was dealing with a man with a bicycle.
She was extremely patient and spent about 10 minutes sorting out this man's needs whilst my husband was slowly getting more and more irritated.
Eventually it was our turn and we told the lady that we wanted to go to Waterloo London. She spoke English well, printed out various itineraries and was extremely helpful. She printed out the tickets and even asked if she should reserve seats for us in the train to Brussels. She really could not have been nicer.
Once we arrived at Brussels Station we asked for directions to the train to Waterloo. No, there wasn't one until the next day we were told. We produced our itinerary which clearly listed a train to Waterloo that evening. This was to be yet another geography and history lesson. There is a Waterloo in Belgium of course (that battle) and that was the Waterloo the ticket clerk had issued the tickets for!
The next Eurostar train to the Waterloo we wanted was the following day, and no we couldn't buy tickets for it that evening, we had to return and purchase them in the morning.
The next problem to overcome was to find a hotel for the night and it was gone 10 pm by now with tourist information closed. One of the ticket clerks told us that there was a hotel on the back-side of the station, so off we went to look for it.
The first hotel we came to was an Ibis and that was fully booked, the next 3 star hotel wanted 220 Euros a night for a basic double room so we went to find another. It's not as if we were going to even get more than 8 hours in the room. The next one was run by Asians, the room was on the top floor but no fire escape. The next was fully booked.
Passing a restaurant we noticed that they had a sign up for rooms. 60 Euros a night with breakfast or without. It looked like the local Doss house with hall carpets held together with masking tape and full of immigrants. I asked to inspect the room which turned out to be very clean and not too bad at all. It even had it's own en-suite bathroom. The lady who showed me round was delightful. So, we agreed to stay. They didn't accept credit cards so we left our bags in the room and went to find a bank or ATM for the extra Euros.
On our return, they made us sandwiches and pots of tea (with milk) which was much appreciated. The Hotel Restaurant is called Oh Fadista! (tel: 0032(0)2.521.40.50 ) and if you ever happen to in Brussels and need a cheap clean place to stay staffed by tarts with a heart, then we recommend it. It might be on the backside of the station but the owners and their staff were lovely.
In the morning we bought Eurostar tickets to King Cross St Pancras (Eurostar no longer goes to Waterloo it seems) and had a very pleasant and comfortable journey back to England.
Vauxhall and a design fault
The morning after we got back we began sorting out our problems and in the process discovered that certain models of Vauxhall cars made in the past few years have suffered failure because of a design fault. This has been reported on Watchdog and the Daily Mail site. We also realised that the car was still under warranty because of a public statement made by Vauxhall.
We immediately stopped any work on the car and waited for a response from Vauxhall.
Green Flag European Recovery
The other thing we did was to check the details of the Green Flag Insurance and apparently we could possibly bring the car home. I spoke to Green Flag who said that it depended on the price of the car (was it worth it) and that it could take up to 15 days whilst waiting for a car transporter to fill. She also told us that the garage had started work on the car and that we would have to pay for that before they would release it.
We had been in contact with the garage ourselves and had originally been told that they could not get any parts for days. It seems that Green Flag were not keen to repatriate the car.
More from Vauxhall
The lady at Vauxhall told us that we would need to give the garage permision to remove the cylinder head to find out what had caused the engine failure. We agreed to go ahead with that but unfortunately it comes down to a question of trust. Vauxhall have the opportunity to blame the auto-gas installation when at the same time they have a good number of petrol only vehicles failing in the UK.
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