Driving in the Balkans with a Serbian Car

There are a number of difficulties with driving in Serbia. I have alluded to the first problem--the Cyrillic alphabet. Reading street signs is difficult when on foot. In a car the challenge is compounded to the point of impossibility. So you are reduced to counting streets and hoping that what is on the map as a major thoroughfare actually corresponds with your assessment of the street's importance. It was not infrequent for us to pull out our phone and use the compass to help us assess exactly which direction we were traveling in and how that corresponded to the direction that we thought we were traveling in. Sadly the correlation was less than perfect.
The second problem was a lack of help from external sources of navigation--a GPS could have helped a lot. Our European GPS had major roads in Serbia, but lacked city maps, so just getting the car in Belgrade and then getting out of the city was challenging. Back to the counting blocks technique--it is primitive but it does work. So long as you have an accurate map. Which is another hurdle.
The biggest hurdle of all is one that there is nothing to be done with. If you want to leave Serbia with a Serbian car, you are bound to be headed to a country that is not the least bit fond of Serbians. And they think that you are Serbian. Uh oh. It is one of the few instances when we have tried to appear non-native. The car rental person noted that Croatia and Slovenia, two places we were driving, hated Serbia and previous customers had had problems with cat calls and vandalism. She recommended looking as American as possible--not that Americans are all that popular in that part of the world either, but it is all a matter of balance.
The only time someone noted our car's provenance to us was in a rural town in Croatia, where we were making no secret of the fact that we did not speak Serbo-Croatian. Still they were suspicious. We quickly assured them that it was merely the place we started our journey, now who we were, but it did make us cautious about where we put the car in the future. We managed to return the car to Belgrade, without significant detours, more or less in tact.