Gully and Elise's Travel Blog: Leaving Home…Again

We sold the car back in Bratislava a week and a half ago but I still have a bitter taste in my mouth from the whole experience. Bear with me while I vent a little. If you read my post “Slovakian Auto Bizarre” back in June, you can gather how stressful the purchase process was. Multiply that by 100 and you get the stress level of the sell back process. After things went flawlessly on the road and behind the wheel for exactly 11,166 km we figured we were due for a mishap. We didn’t think that mishap would be in the form of two Slovak guys holding us hostage (figuratively) for 500€.

When we got back to Bratislava we thought it would be smart to pay a visit to the auto bazaar two days early to do a sort of dress-rehearsal of selling back the car. We needed the car right up until our train was leaving for Switzerland in two days and we didn’t want any surprises at the last minute. According to the Slovaks everything was just dandy with the car. And, as far as we could tell, we had done everything we needed to in order to sell back the car for the pre-arranged price. The stage was set for the big day. We showed up at 8 am and the Slovaks did another inspection of the car. All of a sudden, things weren’t so dandy. Out of nowhere they started claiming that we needed to pay for all sorts of maintenance items. First, they wanted 80€ for 4.5 L of oil to do an oil change and 40€ for the labour. That’s 120€ (=$158 CAD) for an oil change!! Last time I took my Integra to Mr. Lube it cost $50 for semi-synthetic! I wasn’t buying it. Regardless, we had asked specifically about changing the oil when we bought the car and they had specifically said NOT to do it. They went on about an air filter for 50€, a thorough detailing for 80€, a new Johnson rod for a ridiculously unfair price and so forth. They knew we needed to catch a train to Switzerland that morning so they figured they could squeeze a few extra bucks – I mean euros – out of the stupid, rich Canucks. Oh, how naïve they were, how so very naïve. As the clock ticked closer and closer to the train’s departure time I worked frantically on both dictionary.com translator and Google translator as we pored over the terms of the contract. Elise and I had all our ducks in a row with respect to the contract terms and I wasn’t going to budge. These guys had nothing (except for 3500€ of our money in cash!). They were pretty nice guys so I was surprised at this turn of events. By 10:30 I had miraculously bargained them down so that all we had to pay was an extra 100€ for a mysterious scratch, which was fair. Not bad considering the Slovaks could have simply said (in Slovak) “take what we give you and get the hell off our property”. Maybe the misunderstanding was all due to the language barrier. Either way, I guess it was only fitting to have a dramatic end to such an epic road trip. We’ll miss the Space Star. That car was like a home to us. Actually, it WAS our home for three months.

-G