Renting a car is an insanely complicated experience when no rental car place has any cars available for the first nearly forty-eight hours you are in town and the information from the first botched reservation is still in their system…this makes things difficult. It’s one simple cancellation, how hard can it be?
Apparently, very hard..
After about an hour of phone calls to two different organizations (including one conference call) – also, a huge shout out to the branch manager at the Hertz counter we ultimately ended up at, who stuck with us through this whole mess – we finally drove off the lot in a shiny silver Nissan. We said farewell to Amras’ family, and hit the road to Virginia.
I have done and seen many things, and many places, but the last time I did anything near a road trip, I was eight years old and my family was driving to California. I spent most of the time asleep in the backseat (my father will argue that not much has changed, as I still have a tendancy to fall asleep in moving vehicles, except this time! So ha!). Anyway, for practical purposes this is my first encounter with driving several hours a day, playing navigator, eating way too much snack food, and singing along to classic rock music while stuck in traffic.
And. I. LOVE IT.
Miles and miles and miles of open highway just…going on. I’ve not been seized by the urge to just keep going, since I was in Europe walking over a bridge in Bath, and wondered if anyone would notice if I just didn’t come back to college on Monday. This, this is like that…
We have a plan, we do. We have to make Virginia in time for Amras’ high school reunion tomorrow night; and we will, but in the meantime there are several hundred miles between us and our destination.
We crossed the state line into Kentucky in the late afternoon, fought our way through the insane rush hour traffic, and pulled off the highway for real food (even superstars cannot survive forever on road food), and figured out where to stay for the night. Smartphones have made road-trips a lot easier, no more worn out travel brochures, instead we had a hotel within about twenty minutes of finishing our meal, which is good, because we were tired and driving all night was not exactly on the agenda.
But we still have a lot of driving to do…as we are, well, still in Kentucky…
So…off we go again…