A few days after the weekend trip I was on another date – with another girl. It was our first one, but she said she wanted to go out and look for abandoned houses.
Miraculously the car started on the first attempt, but fuel was low. Or I thought it was low, as the gauge wasn’t working. I had a notebook with kilometers and litres refuelled in the car.
Well, we did refuel. And after getting my last money’s worth of gas in its tank, the car gave up. I tried starting for 20 minutes. Nothing happened.
So I called my insurance company. Ever since my first summer car broke down, I’ve had an insurance, which includes towing.
They towed it to the nearest workshop, who got into examining. The starter was indeed broken. Should have fixed it in the beginning, as it wasn’t an expensive part.
The issue was, that the insurance company had towed it to the most expensive workshop in Espoo. They charged 200 euros for just finding the fault, a change of the starter would have been another 400 euros. A total of 600 euros for a 110 euro part to a 1200 euro car? No thanks.
I put the car up for sale, sold it with 120 euros to a polite young Romani the following day. Turns out he fixed it and put it up for sale for 1200 euros the following day.
At that time I thought this was a blessing. But as I had already decided to explore for one more summer, I bought all you can travel train tickets for five weeks. Little did I know, what was about to happen.