London to York, Day 2: Bank Holiday in Edgeware (part2)

It felt a little like a hapless-tourist comedy film, sitting on the sidewalk in front of a closed rental car office in Edgeware. I imagined some dinky soundtrack playing somewhere, fast motion cuts of me or Sharon getting up, looking forlornly over the locked gate, covering our eyes at the window as we peer inside, vainly semi-expecting someone to suddenly appear with a bag of fast-food nosh and an apology at the ready. Yeah, it was riot.

Hello, Edgeware. Lovely day, innit ? 

Maybe I was flashing on Planes, Trains and Automobiles .

We called Chris to let him know what was up, although there was little point to it (he doesn't have a car, and even if he did, what could he do?), except for getting him out of bed again. I thought I could hear the Snickers bar melting in the warm sun, in Sharon's bag.

After an hour and fifteen minutes, the phone rang. Melanie apologized up and down, said she had been on the phone the entire time trying to get this worked out.

"So, do this," she said, "get a cab and take it to King's Cross. Have the cab wait and we'll pay for it, and your car will be waiting for you there. They're expecting you."

Good news/bad news. The good news was there was a car waiting for us; the bad news was that I was going to have to drive it out of downtown London...which is precisely what I didn't want to do in the first place. Sharon was a little disappointed by this development - she thought they should just come and get us, and hand over the keys. On some level, seeing as how someone screwed this pooch quite magnificently, this would have made some sense. But clearly this wasn't going to happen - it was a bank holiday, and almost no one was working.

We gathered up the bags and ambled up the street - there appeared to be a crosswalk up there where Sharon thought we should flag a cabbie.. On the way up to it, a cab spied us and pulled over before I even had a chance to flag it. I guess a couple of people toting four pieces of airport-ready bags on High St in Edgeware screams "tourists in need of a cab". Lucky guess.

We wrestled the bags in to the cab; the driver was a London cabbie straight out of central casting, a bald, deeply accented bloke in his late sixties, jovial and friendly, not at all surprised that we got hung up on the holiday. "You're my last fare today; I'm off to Spain for a three week holiday tomorrow."

As we approached King's Cross, it occurred to me to ask for directions to get back to the M1, despite having the GPS, and of course he recited them with cabbie-precision, and of course I was completely unable to follow it. Sharon nodded; she said she got it.

We went by the zoo. A queue easily half a mile long snaked its way from the admission gate. Bank holiday, beautiful late summer weather. Let's go to the zoo, luv.

The cabbie deposited us at the EuropCar office, which was in the throes of no-other-rental-car-office-open-on-a-bank-holiday chaos,

EuropCar at King's Cross

and we stood in line at the counter. Well, I did; Sharon sat and kept on eye on the luggage.

The guy next to me explained to the clearly overwhelmed desk guy (one of four) that he had rented a car the prior weekend because his Ferrari's windshield wipers didn't work. When the shop returned his Ferrari (my sympathy levels dipping even further here), the wipers still didn't work, and he needed a car again (a V-8 Audi, he insisted). It wasn't clear to me why the guy behind the desk needed to hear the bit about his Ferrari; maybe it was for my benefit.

Thanks for that, Nigel. Good luck with your Ferrari.

We got the paperwork straightened out, they slapped a deposit on my credit card (which Sharon objected to, but I was too weary to argue) and after a solid hour, we piled into a black Ford Focus.

The directions out of the car hire joint that the cabbie left us with were predicated on a dodgy little right turn out of the office,

EuropCar on the right. Get across that lane in front, miss the lorrie, and head down Penton Rise on the left. Sure, mate.. YOU do it. 

across three lanes of traffic, to head south on Penton Rise, then over to Wicklow St, then a quick jog to Britannia St, then right back onto the A501. Follow that, he said, and you'll run right into the M1 (eventually).

Piece of cake. 

Yeah, right.

Well, the three lanes of traffic (deceptively quiet in the Google Maps screen grab above) was packed with traffic, and I just didn't see us getting across. Screw it. We fired up the Focus, my palms sweating, and we headed left out of the lot. Sharon had the GPS running, pointed at York.

One left turn after a mile or so, and we were on the A1. Which is the same road we took the year before, the parallel route north. Stayed out of the bus lane (the only bit of advice he gave us that I actually followed) and in fifteen minutes we were in the outskirts of the city proper, and speeding our way up to York.

So much for being clever. Three and a half hours after being dropped in Edgeware, we were finally heading toward Yorkshire.

Note to self. Try another car hire strategy. London traffic 2, Dave 0.
   

London to York, Day 2: Bank Holiday in Edgeware (part1)

We won't spend too much time talking about the driving in England this time around. (Maybe a little...) The simple fact is that, after some harrowing moments during last year's trip, mostly in the early days, you kind of get the hang of it. I did, anyway.

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.