So it was that for the 2013 trip, we picked a lonely little rental car office in Edgware, a non-descript neighborhood in far northern London (and after which the great north-south London boulevard Edgware Rd is named), to get the car, conceding the 40 pound taxi ride out there from Paddington as a necessary expense. Two turns and two drop-shot roundabouts to the M1.
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| Outside the Edgware EuropCar office, in 2013. |
This year we followed the strategy again, and the office was expecting us. An early morning car run out to Edgware (alright, fifty quid, but who's counting?), in the intermittent rain, and we were in. We waited for a fussy, fur-bedecked lady to get her keys, and approached the desk.
Two years is a pretty long time, but I did complain a bit about the 2013 fiasco; the guy behind the desk, probably making little more than minimum wage, seemed stumped as to how exactly to respond (it wasn't his fault, obviously, and he likely didn't have much authority to apply any compensatory grease to this year's rental agreement), but we ended up with a sky-blue Mercedes A120 hatchback.
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| Bring me my chariot of fire. |
A Mercedes? Well...a really little one - diesel, which was okay - and not exactly an Autobahn burner. Did we get a Mercedes because of the 2013 snafu? Who knows.
Paperwork all sorted, they pulled the car out, went through a perfunctory button tour (key note here: perfunctory), and I successfully navigated a tricky right turn across traffic to head up to the M1. Exhale time?
Well, the two roundabouts between Edgeware Rd and the M1 were less straightforward than they first appeared and I got beeped in both. Shake it off, lad.
The long approach ramp to the M1 felt nice. On the highway at last, a teachable moment redeemed. Let's go to Nottingham.
After a few miles, the traffic on the M1 began to slow. Eh, highways do that. Then slowed some more. Then stopped. Crept forward. Stopped again. Dead stop. Ten minutes passed, crept forward, stopped again. WTF?
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| Speedo at 0. |
Two and a half hours of this. Traffic jams are a modern feature of every industrialized nation, but this was getting stupid. Past stupid. Just not right.
Sharon turned on the radio to kill the pitiless monotony of lorries dropping clutch for their 40 yard creep and hissing their brakes for the inevitable stop. It was raining. We both had to go to the bathroom. This was getting really bad.
We happened to catch a traffic report that the M1 was closed in both directions due to a serious lorry accident; northbound traffic was being diverted off at Watford. Well, not looking forward to being in an unfamiliar place with 60 million impatient drivers, feeling the veins in my bladder stretching like overtuned piano strings. But we didn't have a choice, and eventually crept up to the exit ramp at Watford, drowning in a super-highway's volume of traffic, facing a hideous tangle of access and frontage roads. The crush eased up as side roads began to irrigate traffic in different directions, but we were still lost, still needing to pee.
And what was happening to the Mercedes? As if tranquilized by the traffic jam, the damn thing wouldn't shift out of first gear. As the traffic began to move, I tried to keep up, screaming in first gear, getting beeped. There were paddles on either side behind the wheel; I tried one, shifted to second. Wow. This thing is a clutchless manual shift all of a sudden. HONK. Shifted to third. Traffic stopped ahead, down shift, left paddle. Where are we going? Go left here. Why ? HONK. Just do it, I have to go to the bathroom. Look out !!! HONK. There's a bathroom that way? Or go that way. Turn on the GPS. HONK. Turn here...never mind, too late. Upshift. Turn here. HONK.
Sharon had the portable GPS going, turned on her phone GPS and tried to figure out where we could find a gas station. The GPS' were giving us conflicting instructions, and she was vetoing both. Before long we'd both have pale fluid oozing from our eye sockets.
We descended a long street through the probably-very-nice town of Watford and like a beacon of hope for all mankind, a BP station appeared dead ahead. On the left side of the road too, an added bonus.
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| The BP station, Wiggenhall Rd, Watford. |
Both relieved, we still had a problem. The car wouldn't shift without paddle-assist, and our brave little Mercedes had no manual. We were 10 miles into a 1200 mile, ten day expedition. Paddling is for rivers.
At that moment, fighting off despair, a EuropCar courtesy van (no kidding) pulled into the petrol station, and a tallish, bearded guy of about 32 started pumping gas. I approached him ("Hello, friend," I stammered, immediately realizing that I sounded like a 19th century Amish elder, but for some reason that's all I could managed as a greeting...), explained our dilemma, and he came over, climbed into the car and explained that, while Sharon was slamming console buttons trying to wipe girl-pop off the radio, she accidentally hit the Transmission Mode button, silently changing the tranny from Economy to Manual. The button had only an obscure little icon on it, and no one at Edgware explained it to us. Since we were stuck in first gear for 2 hours anyway, backed up on the M1, we didn't notice until we were liberated at the Watford exit.
He also explained that they probably didn't include the manual because, really???, people steal them. So either this little pony's book was in some drawer in Edgware...or someone had already pinched it, for reasons life isn't long enough to speculate about.
We thanked the guy to the point of embarrassment - he found it all kind of amusing, although thankfully not in a 'tosser stupid Yanks' kind of way.
He gave us directions (more or less) to get out of Watford and head back north, bypassing the M1 backup, and we were finally headed toward Nottingham.
We gave up on the radio, and never turned it on once after that.
