Traveling Adventure #2

The next day we went to the mall and a special store call the Tinker Bell Store. I love Tinker Bell. We looped through the mall, hit Borders then later we had dinner at the Organ Stop Pizza.

This place is cool. They have a huge theater pipe organ with an organist who plays the whole time you’re eating. All of the pipes, bells, drums, bellows, and even puppets are visible. It’s quite a show. We had fun there and the food was good.

We’d had a full day and were ready to head back to our room to play some games. We got into the rental car, started it, but we couldn’t get it out of park. Yes, we had our foot on the break. We tried pressing the break harder, softer. Turn the car off and back on. Seatbelts off, seatbelts on. Door closed, door open. Whatever we did, we could not get the car out of park.

So I called my husband (two states away) and asked him if he knew anything. He said that it was a break thing. We’d tried that already. I called my oldest son (also two states away). He said the same thing and tried to give some other advice. Nothing worked. Someone walking through the parking lot thought it might be a fuse. Some men stopped who worked for other rental car companies and they couldn’t get it to work either. We called the rental car company and had already done all the things that they said to do. So they sent out another car that would take 90 minutes. That kind of blew our evening, sitting in a parking lot watching the Organ Stop Pizza employee making his rounds around the parking lot, over and over and over and over, etc.

Meanwhile, my son had looked up on the Internet the particular model of car we rented and found out that this is a common problem with it. When the tow truck guy got there, he said the same thing. He literally had to break a piece of melted plastic in the gearshift area to free the gearshift to drive it up onto the truck bed.

I asked my son if there were any issues we needed to look out for in this new rental, different make and model. He said that it wasn’t much better. He gave me a list of its issues to watch for and how to avoid one of the issues. Great! Now we are paranoid this car will break down.

I’ll finish up the trip tomorrow.