Renting a car is a great idea when visiting Paros. Just don’t expect too much.

Traveling for an extended period while on contracted income requires economizing as much as possible. That means a lot of walking, supplemented by public transportation. Maybe by the end of this trip we’ll even learn to read bus timetables and routes.

But 50-something days into our trip we arrived on Paros, a Greek island with limited options for getting around. It was time to get our first wheels.

Behold, the mighty Fiat Panda!

The Panda isn’t a model Fiat sells in the United States, so a little background might be helpful. It is basic transportation. It’s small and boxy. And slow. The base engine is a 1.2-liter that makes 69 horsepower. It does 0 to 60 … eventually.

But what it lacks in bells and whistles and power it makes up for in economy. It gets about 50 mpg, important on an island where petrol is 1.75 Euros a liter (roughly $7.50 per gallon). That’s why the Panda is far from an endangered species on Paros. It seems that every third or fourth car is a tiny Fiat.

So I was happy when the rental car guy offered a Panda for less than 20 Euros a day. It seemed like a good deal. A taxi to the airport–buses weren’t running in time for our early morning departure flight–would cost more. Basic, economic transportation (with a stick shift, of course) was just what we needed to get around the island for a few days.

We booked the car through an agency located, according to its website, at the airport. We would have to take a bus from our base in Naousa to pick it up, but that was OK since we needed to drop it off there.

When the rental guy offered to bring it to us, it seemed like the perfect deal.

But then he showed up with the car. Well, eventually he showed up. He was at least 45 minutes late. He didn’t take a credit card, a detail that would have been nice to know up front. The Panda was a truly ugly orange, seemed to be between 5 and 8 years old with 55,000 miles on the odometer, hadn’t been washed in awhile, and had a ripped front seat. The car was on fumes, with scarcely enough fuel to make it to the nearest station.

And the topper: the two front doors had signs advertising his wife’s real estate business.

It was several steps down from the last car I drove, my beloved Volkswagen GTI sold before we left home to help finance the journey.

It was simultaneously the worst rental car ever–a suspicious mind might conclude he rented us his wife’s car during a slow time for home sales, especially since he told us to leave it in any legal space at the airport and he’d pick it up later–and the funniest. We took liberties with parking, hoping any would-be ticket writers would think we were showing property to a client. The Panda was as slow as expected. It struggled to get up hills. But it got us around the island a couple of times, to beautiful spots like Paros Park that aren’t on the bus route.

We also had a major surprise when we pulled into the petrol station. A nice young lady came out and pumped our gas for us. It was the first time either of us had experienced a full-service station in decades, but it’s what they do here.

All in all, despite the terrible color and unwillingly acting as a moving billboard for a realtor, the mighty Panda was a decent car, just what we needed for our time on Paros. Definitely recommended over the bus.