EuroRescue - Praise....

tc80tc80

Well, have I got a story for you about EuroRescue.

Late yesterday afternoon, after a week of touring Normandy France. There on a little laneway in the middle of nowhere (literally) my MPV blew its transmission (gearbox) all over the road.

So; six people. Six peoples worth of suitcases and all of the other stuff that goes into a six person road trip.

To make matters worse we had four hours to get to Cherbourg to make the 8:30pm ferry.

Called EuroRescue. They said they would call me back. Oh crap, I know what that usually means. Mobile rings a minute later, my heart rate lowers.

First gentleman works out who I am, policy number, where we are...... My having a GPS doesn't help as they don't have any way of handling GPS cooridantes. I suggest they should work on that since most people travel with GPS these days.

He says they will call me back. Heart rate climbs again. Mobility rings a minute later. Heart rate lowers again.

Young lady named Ingra confirms all of the details. Twenty minutes later a huge flat bed tow truck shows up. Two people go with the driver and the MPV. Ingra arranges a taxi for the rest of us.

We all make it to the garage 30 minutes later. By this time the MPV has been inspected. Prognosis...... Dead. I can rebuild a engine blindfolded and I can see that a good sized chunk of the gearbox is gone.

I should explain that the MPV is a 2001 Canadian Ford Windstar that we brought with us to the UK for our four year deployment here. The MPV had a value of £1000 if we were lucky. The Gearbox costs about £1500 and about a month to get one shipped over from Canada. Not to mention the 10 hours of labour to drop the engine, replace the gearbox and remount the engine.

Conclusion..... Dig a big hole and push it in.....

So we signed the MPV over to the garage and arranged to have it crushed.

Ingra arranged to get us to Cherbourg via taxi and we arrived with 10 minutes to spare before they closed the gates.

While we where racing across the channel on the fastcat ferry, Ingra arranged a large taxi to pick us up at Portsmouth and take us right to our house near Watford. We arrived at 12:30am this morning.

Total outlay for the rescue operation, £29 pounds for the original policy. The taxi to Cherbourg alone cost 174 Euros. We didn't pay a pence. Everything was covered.

I am seriously impressed with how everything was handled by EuroRescue.
Ingra was amazing and probably called me over a dozen times at every step of the operation to insure everything was okay. She was off shift by the time we reached Portsmouth, but the other person who took over for her had every detail and was just as good.

I will never again consider travelling in Europe without EuroRescue.