Travel Adventure Wrap-UP

So now that we are paranoid about using our rental car, we head off the next day to a permanent swap meet. It was four long buildings with booth after booth after booth. We were planning to return the next day, so this first day, we were just going to look and we would buy the next day when we were sure of what we really wanted.

I bought a couple of things I was sure of the first day and one of my sisters bought a couple of popcorn/bubble shirts. These shirts look the size to fit a large doll or an infant but stretch to fit many body sizes.

So that night we all tried on these shirts. We are all different body sizes. We were very surprised that they looked good on all four of us. So the next day we all went crazy and each bought several of these shirts.

Now came the hard part, getting it all in our suitcases. My stuff barely fit but I made it.

We set four different alarms to make sure we got up at 4 AM to get to the airport, praying the car would work. We made it fine and caught our planes.

We had a lot of fun on our few days away for girl’s time. We're already planning our next one.

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.

Adventures While Away

Well, I’m back. I survived traveling. It’s the nervousness and stress of making sure you don’t over sleep so you hardly sleep at all, getting to the airport in time with time to spare for unexpected problems like traffic at 4:30 in the morning, returning a rental car, finding the right shuttle from one end of the airport to the other, checking in then finally “relaxing” in an uncomfortable chair while you wait for your flight, then having to go to the bathroom just when it’s time to board. No wonder it stresses me out.

Well, I had a great time with my sisters and mom. We rented a car so we could get to the places we wanted to go while there. The first stop was getting to our hotel room, adventure #1.

So we crammed all our suitcases into the trunk and between us in the car (next time we get a van. Four women with luggage and one midsize car!). We followed the airport exit signs and managed to get off the airport. Then there are like four different highways straying from the airport but not the one we wanted. The ones going east and west looked like they were going north and south on the map. We didn’t know which one to get onto to get to the highway we wanted because that was the only one not going into or out of the airport. The signs on the side of the road were vague and unclear. We were all helping drive by giving different opinions on what way we should go. What was the poor driver to do? I was not the driver, but I was giving some of the nonsense directions. We started heading back to the car rental area. (Not on purpose.) We made a few guesses and a few missed turns but finally got on the highway we thought would take us to the highway we wanted and in the direction we wanted.

We finally arrived at out hotel, actually it was a suite at a golf resort, none of us golf, but the price was right and we enjoyed having the two rooms. We unpacked, found a nearby (across the street) grocery store and bought a few provisions. Then we could relax.

Next time I’ll post on adventure #2. I’ll try to do that tomorrow and wrap up my trip on Wednesday.