But 'harrowing' is probably an understatement to describe the hour and a half we spent on our first day behind the wheel last year, when we picked up our rental car on a Monday morning in Chelsea and had to find our way out of London, adjusting on the fly to being on the left, incomprehensible road markings, busses/bikes/trucks bearing down on us from every direction in a panic of rush hour roller derby.
So, being a clever boy, I had planned a devious little strategy for this year's trip. We found a EuropCar office on the northern fringes of London, in a somewhat dreary neighborhood called Edgeware. The office was barely a mile - two turns, Google Maps assured us - from the on-ramp to the massive M1 motorway, which pointed us toward the North and York. We'd take a cab (or, as it turned out, a car hire) to the office, sign the papers and we'd be on the highway in a drama-free 10 minutes. Yeah, it'd be £40 or so to get there from Chelsea - weighed against sparring with rush hour traffic in London, a pittance.
The car arrived on time, we loaded up, said goodbye to my brother and tooled our way to Edgeware, watching the madness of London traffic through the passenger window, feeling pretty damned smug. This was no punt - Edgeware was a decent 12 or 13 miles and the trip was 40 minutes, passing through a patchwork of alternately elegant and shabby neighborhoods; open air markets next to cell phone shops next to empty store fronts next to single-name fashion boutiques. I felt at times like we could have been in Paris, Nairobi, Cairo or Sao Paolo. London is crushingly huge.
I kept checking to be sure I had my wallet and smokes and cell phone on my person. How cool would it be to lose my wallet in a hired car on the first full day of my UK vacation?
The car pulled up to the EuropCar office, dropped us in front and took off. I didn't like Edgeware, but I'm a tourist and tourists don't come here and I wasn't supposed to like it. We have four pieces of luggage, some over-the-shoulder pieces. Central casting tourists, feeling a little conspicuous.
We walked up to the door. No one behind the counter, but a little sign said to ring the bell. I rang it. No one came. Rang it again. We could see a little office behind the counter with an open door, there was a monitor on the desk, and it was on. Someone is here. Maybe they're out back in the car yard. Rang the bell. No one came. I yelled "hello?" over the adjoining gate, toward the garage I could see behind it. Sharon rang the bell (believing, I guess, that I was doing it wrong, and maybe I was); the same nobody came.
I stepped away from the door and looked - really looked - at this office. Um, this office is closed. Closed, as in no one's here. And why would that be?
Because, as we had learned at some point in the still-young journey, today was a bank holiday. I'm not entirely sure what a 'bank holiday' really is - we have Federal holidays in the States, but they're actually commemorating something. Columbus, Labor, Veterans...bank holidays seem to be days off just for the sake of having days off. Which is actually sort of a nice idea, I guess, except when your rental car office is enjoying a day off and they have your car keys.
We're barely a day into this thing, and we're looking at Plan B. Think.
OK, we had printed off the car reservation, and that's got phone numbers on it. I am immediately grateful that we set up international calling on the cell phones. We call the "emergency" number for Travel Centre, our travel agent, and get a cheerful girl named Melanie on the other end. "Oh dear," she said, learning of our predicament, "let me make some calls and see if we can fix this, and I'll call you back straight away..."
So we sat. On the sidewalk, in front of a closed rental car office in Edgeware, luggage piled around us.We watched the traffic up and down High Street.
There was a little café down the block from us, maybe 30 yards, an outdoor table with some locals having coffee, one or two of them glancing in our direction from time to time.
I'm not particularly shy about asking people for help when I need it, but there wasn't likely to be anything that anyone there could do for us. There was also a hotel across the street, but so what? We need a friggin' car.
My bladder didn't care that it was a bank holiday, nor that we were sitting on a sidewalk in Edgeware. I asked Sharon if she wanted some coffee, she said no, so I gamely walked down to the café and went inside. I quickly determined it was a Portuguese café; a short, surly looking older guy was inside, behind a tiny counter. There were candy bars in the counter display, so I bought a Snickers and asked if he had a restroom. He scowled at me (hey, gimme a break, I bought a candy bar from ya!! ) and pointed over his shoulder. Bio-crisis averted. I thanked him on my way out; he said nothing. Maybe I should have bought two.
Walked back, handed the Snickers to Sharon (who was in no mood for a Snickers bar), and sat down.
We wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment