I grew up in manual-land and was in the US for a little title road trip from Denver to LA a while ago. Rented a cheap car, got a Kia Rio. When I started crossing the Rockies, the car would never really know what to do with the automatic transmission and keep shifting back and forth on the long inclines.

My luck was, it was a semi-auto if you wanted to. You could nudge the selector to the left and have a bit of a sequential shifter thing, just without a clutch pedal. I thought that was a neat compromise and gotta say I enjoyed my 10 days in that car.