And the point of a rental car is . . . ?

Snuffles's beloved blue Intrepid is in the shop getting tweaked and tuned up so that we can sell it soon. With my car sold, and his in the garage, we needed to rent a car for a week so we could get around.

I noticed when we were driving home from Avis that the air conditioning seemed to wimp out periodically. Not a complete absence of cold air but decidedly warmer air (does tepid apply to air?); it would come and go with no particular pattern.

Today was the first that we drove it again and when we got in the car, a little blue indicator light was lit up on the dash. It looked like the coolant / thermostat / whatever it's called light. Immediately we turned off the a/c and the light went away. I called Avis to say that we were having trouble and the first thing the guy said was "We close at 1:00 today". It was 12:17.

I said, "No, you need to wait until I get there. This is an issue." It really shouldn't be an issue to get there before closing but with the indicator light having gone on, I wanted to assure that someone would be there if we had a problem with the car en route.

Then he looked up our invoice number and said, "Oh, that's a brand new car. You don't have anything to worry about!"

The hell? I replied, "The idea of having a rental car while my car is in the garage is to have a car that actually works!"

We headed over to Avis and turned the air on again. No light. But the temperature of the a/c continued to fade in and out. Snuffles was debating fussing about it but I insisted that we return it to Avis and get a different vehicle.

Yay for me being assertive!! The car in question was a Subaru Impreza, not a bad little car. But the car we exchanged it for . . . NICE!!! We got a Nissan Altima 2.5S (I think that's the right model). Much nicer vehicle! More power, smoother ride, roomier interior. Not to mention no apparent issues with the cooling system!!

In fact, we like it so much that we now are convinced that this is the car we want to buy when we return to the States. We are both absolutely thrilled with it. Snuffles even said to me, "I'm sure glad you didn't listen to me!"

Now I'm just trying to convince him to go ahead and buy one now and ship it to Korea. Problem is, Koreans do NOT like Japan and any of it's products. I said we'll just have to get some Hyundai logo bits and replace the Nissan ones with them. Think it will work?

Rental Car Shown Below