PT Cruisers SUCK!!

Like I said, PT Cruisers SUCK!!!

This is the third time that I've gotten stuck with a PT cruiser for my race rental vehicle. I hate them! This time it was extra sucky! We came back from practice on Friday and realized we had a flat tyre. Booo. It was just an inconvenience that I didn't want to deal with. Well, we got on getting the spare put on. Melissa was working on getting the lug nuts off, and suddenly one of them sheared off! Ugghhh. Someone had cross threaded it. At this point, some photog guy must have decided that we needed help, so he came over and finished off putting the spare on for us. He proceeded to shear off another lug nut, so at that point, we only had 3 left. Luckily, they were in a triangle pattern, so safer than all next to each other, I guess.

Well, I spent a long time on Saturday morning trying to get Thrifty in Canada to give us a different car and or get the situation fixed for us. They were of no help. All of the garages around were only open until noon on Saturday, but as it turns out, it didn't matter, as the parts that we needed were only available from a dealer...which are not open on Saturdays. Our friend fixed the flat for us, and we left the switching back process until Sunday morning.

SOOOO lucky they had this setup at their house!

Sunday morning comes along, and we're all super hung over and not looking forward to putting the newly repaired tyre back on. Luckily, our friends had another house guest, Sam, who was super psyched to help out. Sam took charge of getting the situation sorted. Well, turns out whoever the idiot was that put those wheels on before us had cross threaded most of the lug nuts. Same sheared off another. Now we were down to 40%. Not okay. Luckily (AGAIN) our friend Gab has a full on garage lift at their house. I came out of the house from getting packed and they had the whole PT Piece of Shit Cruiser up on the lift with the two front wheels completely dismantled. They were "borrowing" a stem/lug nut combo from the other wheel for the janky one. Well, lucky for us they're so car savy, and they got it all sorted and we were on our way to Burlington, VT for our flight, fully prepared to have it out with Thrifty once we got there.

Unfortunately, we had a bit of an epic journey back to the states! When we got to the border crossing, they decided to harass the hell out of us and keep us there for 45 minutes asking all sorts of questions about what we were doing in canada, how we were funding the trip, what we had to declare, etc... the ONLY things we had to declare were two chocolate bars that Melissa had bought, so we thought it was pretty strange that they were bugging us so much. They spent 15 minutes searching the car and then came in and asked loads of questions about what had happened to the car...the whole sheared off lug nuts/wheel problem.

I explained the whole situation to them and then they continued asking questions about whether the spare had been out of our possesion, where we had gotten it fixed, etc...In fact, they asked the same questions several times (a little slow on the uptake, I guess!). In the end, they finally let us go after giving us a lecture about it being unsafe to drive like that. Thanks, we already know that! ha In the end we got to the airport pretty late, but our flights were delayed anyway, so it was ok!

We couldn't figure out why they were bothering us so much, but after we left we decided that they must have thought we were trying to smuggle drugs across the border. Idiots! Wouldn't they figure that if we were going to try and do that we wouldn't rock up with missing lug nuts, no hub cap on the wheel, a spare tyre that was a bit dangly, and me with a lost driver's license?!?

In the end it was a pretty funny story, but during it all it was a huge hassle, and we were so lucky that our friends were so savy and got us all sorted. Otherwise we'd have been sitting in Bromont for who knows how long trying to get all of that sorted out!