Hire Car Destruction
When we go on Euro surf trips, we generally hire a car. The cost of a hire car plus a foot passenger ticket usually works out about the same as taking your own car on the ferry, and you end up with a nice gleaming, super-reliable car, rather than our usual monsters... Also, because it's not your car, you can abuse the hell out of it with no worries...As long as the damage is fairly unnoticable, you can get away with murder.
The record for destruction though, must go to me and Rup and a Citroen Saxo. Nice car the Saxo, but not really built to take a surf trip abuse. The thing is, when we hire a car on a surf trip, it's far more than a mode of transport. We basically live in it. We don't do things like pay to stay places, we do what the French call 'camping sauvage', also known as flinging a tent up whereever the hell we can, and pulling it down in the morning before the Gendarmes come round. If you don't wake up early enough, they you get that wonderful early morning alarm call of a policeman shaking the tent and shouting, 'NO CAMPING! INTERDIT!' We'd then spend all day in the car...it's our shelter from the rain, it's our living room, and, by sticking a cooker in the footwell, it's our kitchen.
The first thing that happened was we got it stuck on the beach. We couldn't be arsed to walk over the dunes at L' Estangnots, so we drove over the path, to take a look. When we went to turn the car around, the patch of hardpacked sand in front of the lifeguard hut turned about to be nothing more like soft packed. The car sank up to its hubs. We had a go at pushing it, putting towls under the tyres, and all we did was sink it even more. Oh shit. We need a landrover. I wandered back to the carpark to see if I could find someone who would help. I spotted a big landie, and went over. Through my crap french, I explained that the voiture was dans le sable, and um, could you pull it out s'il vous plait? The french guy was stoked. Here was a chance to really use his Landie. His mates were cooking in the back, and he abruptly kicked em out, motioned me into the passenger seat, and we were off to the car at high speed. He went straight into action, tied off a rope onto the front of the Saxo, climbed back into the Landie and let rip. He put his foot straight down, before Rup and a chance to starighten the steering or close the door, and literallly dragged the poor little Saxo out with brute force. The open door swung around into a fence post, and the wheels got pulled over the kerb at a weird angle. I think we did some damage...
The french guy beamed at us, we "merci beaucouped" him to death, and he unhitched the car, and drove back to his mates while we checked the car. Uhoh, there was a dent in the door, nothing major, but you could see it. There goes the deposit. Oh and the electric windows were now full of sand. Instead of that nice smooth servo sound, we heard a loud grinding graunch noise as the windows wound up. Ooops. But there was worse. Once we drove off, we realised that something had happened to the structure of the car, now, when you took your hands off the wheel, the trusty Saxo would start to wander drastically off the road, as if you had turned the wheel...We'd killed it.
That night we went for a drink. We had a few at the Rock Food, and then headed to the little picnic area we were sleeping in. It was pissing down with rain, and we were just a little bit drunk on kronenbourg and too much sun all day. Rup was playing with the handbrake, just blipping it on and off as we went down a quiet road, just quickly locking up the wheels. He held it on just a fraction too long, and the car went into a lazy spin down the road. We spun fully twice round on the wet road, and came to rest on the hard shoulder on the wrong side of the road, facing the way we'd just come. "Did you mean to do that?!" "Um, no..." Well, at least we didn't hit anything..
We carried on to the picnic area. We werer messing about, so we decided to reenact an army advert that was on telly at the time... When we got to the picnic area in the woods, we started...
"Get off the road!" We quickily pulled off into the woods..
"Kill the lights!" We turned the headlights off. Bad move. We're now doing 40mph over rough ground, in thick forest, in pitch blackness..In the advert it was a beefy army landrover. We were in a tiny Saxo.
"Shit, turn the lights back on, turn the lights back on!!!"
We didn't hit anything, but the suspension was sorely tested... Next morning, "NO CAMPING!" We groaned and got up.
It was about time to head home. Back in Spain, it was raining like mad. There were landslips, and closed roads, and swollen rivers. We got on a road that was still under construction...we weren't sure whether or not we were even supposed ot be on it, as workmen were looking at us strangley through the rain, but we only had the vaguest idea where we were, so we pushed on. The road was really just a flattened out bit of countryside, there was no tarmac, just a big dirt track, with plant machinery to dodge round every few minutes. It was like we were in a car commercial. With the rain, the excuse of a road had turned into a full on rally stage. We hammered down it, and our white Saxo turned brown, as bits of stone hammered and chipped at the paintwork...
We finally got to the campsite in Santander. Horrible place, but the only one there, and this part of Spain is so hilly, not to mention full of ETA terroists, that you really have to stay in a campsite. Theres just nowhere flat enought to put a tent, and you don't really want to wander too far off the beaten track in a car with Madrid plates. The bullet holes riddling the 'Welcome to the Basque Country" sign give you a clue why not.
Next morning, we noticed that the car door was open. Then we noticed that all our stuff was gone. Someone had broken into the car, and taken everything except my bodyboard, which fortuanly for me was tightly wedged behind the passenger seat. Everything else was gone, all our kit, rups board, passports. clothes..the lot. We found our rucksacks and our stuff scattered around by the hedge at the side of the campsite, but Rups board and wettie was gone, and so was my wallet with £80 quid in.... But as for the car, oh dear. More damage. Now we had a big hole where the lock used to be, and the door wouldn't close properly..
Pissed off monumentally, we spent a couple of hours messing around with the police, and then we took the car back to the hire place. But, a tiny bonus. The car hire people felt so sorry for us, they let us off the deposit we should have forfeited for all the damage to the car. We just blamed it all on the theives. Only a small bonus, though...
If you ever go to Santander, do NOT stay at the campsite there, the police didn't seem to be surprsed we got robbed, and
the neighbouring barrio looks well rough. Go to Somo instead, there's some really nice ones, right on the beach. And look after your car..
By Jon
