Tail Light Out – Oceano, CA

Someone pointed out to us that our right rear taillight was burned out. So, we made an appointment to have that fixed and scheduled an oil change too. So, we dropped the truck off for a half-day at the local Ford dealer. Well, 4 hours later, they called to tell us that there had been a slight accident. While pulling our truck into the bay to work on it, they hit the wall and damaged the passenger side of the truck bed.

They said they would need the rest of the week to do the body work and would provide us with a rental until the truck was fixed. We were not very angry about it – a small car meant we could go to the city (San Luis Obispo) and have no problem finding parking. I think they were surprised by our calm response. Also, we are staying here in Oceano until the end of October so we weren’t negatively impacted by the schedule.

So, we got a Mazda and were off. We have found renting cars a fun way to check out the different manufacturers/models. The only thing we liked about this Mazda was the emergency brake mechanism. You push down to engage the emergency brake and then you push down again to disengage – very clever and easy to work. Otherwise the model was very poorly designed – mirrors didn’t really show enough to be helpful backing up, the seats did not lower so you hit your head upon entering the car and have to stretch out to reach the ground when exiting, gas mileage was worse than the truck’s (12 MPG), etc.