Slovakia - Our Drive to the Plant

We were heading to Nove Mesto. We flew into Vienna, rented a car, and then drove across the border into Slovakia. I have never driven a stick shift car, and all of the vehicles were manual transmission, so my coworker Aaron was elected our driver. We had been told that we were to decline extra insurance on the rental car, and we did so.

We had our Mexican controller, Octavio, with us, and he caused a minor sensation when we crossed over the border and we had to show our passports. I would imagine that Mexican passports were rare heading into Slovakia. The border areas were a lot like toll booths. I couldn't help looking around as we went through to see if I could find any sign of what I suspect were the more stringent protective areas left from the Soviet days, but I didn't see anything.
Everything went smoothly at first. Aaron kept to the speed limit briefly, until we saw that like the US people totally ignore it. At that time he decided to "follow the flow of traffic." We sailed through Brataslava and into the middle of Slovakia. At that time, there really only appeared to be one main highway in the whole country, and we were on it. About half way through our journey, we came around a bend to a overpass, and a truck was stopped on the side of the road. The driver had lost his load, which were crates and boxes, and they were strewn all over our lane. The lane to our left had cars in it, so there was nowhere for us to go. Aaron just drove through them. We didn't want to stop and inspect the damage because we couldn't speak the language, and I don't believe that we had a cell phone that worked either. We kept going and for a while everything seemed OK.
But then, what we feared in the back of our minds happened. Our speed started dropping and the temperature gauge started rising! We were more than a little nervous. This continued formsome time, until we weren't going that fast at all. We barely made it to the plant, but then the admin assistant there helped us get a new rental car. There ended up being some trouble because we had not asked for the extra insurance, but it worked out for us in the end.