Unfortunately Murphy’s law has struck us completely

Everything went great: the caravan was packed, the route planned, even our own apartment could be rented. On February 27th we started in Stuttgart at 3:00 a.m. to do some kilometers on the first tour towards San Sebastián.

Shortly after Karlsruhe there was a loud bang and the car stopped moving. In freezing cold we waited with the children quite long in the night just close to the autobahn for the ADAC and were then all towed to a car yard.

In the meantime we are all sitting with grandma in Mannheim, the caravan is also here, but it is uncertain what will happen to the car. The Ford garage couldn’t make a 100% diagnosis yet (although they have the car already for 3 days), but it’s probably a gearbox failure. The mood is between “it will be alright” and “Oh dear everything is over before it has started…”

We are thinking about alternatives (buy a car and sell it after the trip because a rental car with free kilometers is quite expensive for the long time).

Update: Thursday morning we received the message of the Ford garage that it is a gearbox failure and that it will take quite a long time to fix it. There are supply bottlenecks not only in the IT sector but also in the delivery of car parts – that’s what we had been told so far. So at the moment you can neither get a reasonable used car nor an appointment at the registration office in Germany. But with the help of Thomas Iglauer (the best garage of Stuttgart – for us of the world :)) and an appointment at a registration office in Mannheim (in Stuttgart we would have had to wait several weeks) we were able to buy a “new” used car within 24h. That’s almost a miracle and pretty amazing. Thank you, Thomas! Oh fun fact: while we were on the road to get the papers of the new old car the Ford garage called us and said that it will be possible to organize a gearbox until tomorrow or Monday. Suddenly everything should run like clockwork?! We don’t think so and because of this we sticked to our plan to buy the new old car. Now we have plenty of time to repair the old one (which in fact is newer than the new one ;)) and when we are back we’ll see which car we will sell or keep 🙂

You think that’s all crazy?! Not really – we worked so hard to organize our family time, the children were often put in front of the television with the excuse: “soon we will have lots of time for you” and now it should all end after some kilometers? Nope, but keep your fingers crossed that this time it all works out.