If you know me, you know: I like adventure when I travel and I’ve had a little more than my fair share. From being stuck in various cities for a dozen reasons to fined on not one but two trains in Italy to being lost in the scrubland of Portugal (thanks, evil Google maps lady), to shaken down by a Cuban family to robbed by a gypsy in Spain - I’ve dealt with some stuff and I am a better traveler for it.
So who would have imagined that it would be a mean Enterprise car rental girl in Tampa that cracked my impenetrable shell and brought me to tears - salty, dirty, tired tears shed on a folding chair in a downtown Tampa Enterprise parking lot as the sun went down - after every other customer had been helped and 90 minutes after the agency had closed for the day. And I had no car.
To be fair, the day had not started well. Or the week. Or the month, really. But Sondra Morgan and I had flight credits to burn and a nearly frantic need to feel the warmth of the sun, so we hatched a very short-notice plan to run away to Florida for a few days. It was going to be great. Assuming I actually made it to Florida, that is.
When I got to my Rochester hotel room Thursday night, I asked the desk staff to reserve a taxi to take me to the airport and I paid them to let me leave my car there. But at 5 am, no taxi. Or at 5:30. All the pacing, phone calling and swearing I could muster did not produce a taxi, so I started loading my bags into my own car in flip flops in a desperate hope that I could still make it in time to get my bag checked. Just then the taxi pulled up and raced me there with plenty of apologies plus some kind of explanation that I really didn’t even listen to. I’d had 2.5 hours of sleep and I was not being mean to him, but I only cared about getting there at that point. He wouldn’t take money when he dropped me off - that was nice and also entirely appropriate.
I was definitely past the window for checking a bag, but the misery of a couple of other traveling groups were my saving grace and, while I felt bad for them, I was so damn grateful. They were traveling internationally, I gathered, and were missing all kinds of documentation - COVID stuff I think, so there was a giant keruffle at the counter. Incredibly, helping tend to the disaster at hand was an off-duty registration agent who was actually just going to be a passenger on the flight. She jumped behind the counter and checked my bag for me out of nothing but the goodness of her heart. I was lucky and grateful, but it was a tough way to start the day with no sleep AND on a full moon (from her days working on the psych ward, my mother told me I shouldn’t even leave my house or talk to anyone on a full moon. LOL)
Anyway, Sondra caught up with me in Tampa and we headed to the Enterprise counter only to learn that my reservation was at the downtown location. WTH? Screw Priceline - it never made that apparent in the reservation process, and if we switched to the airport, the price of the car was going to double. Shit.
After a phone call to Enterprise downtown to tell them we were coming late (no prob, the girl said) plus a $55 Uber ride (!!) we were standing in an inner-city parking lot with a lot of people all trying to rent cars. We were the only people with luggage, strangely, but whatever. What happened next defies logic and proved that no good deed goes unpunished...
The girl who greeted us, who I’m fairly certain was also the girl I spoke to on the phone earlier, told us too bad, our reservation was at three and so she didn’t have a car for us. I informed her that I had called and spoken with someone, and also that the Enterprise rental agreement does not say anything of the sort. But I was being really, really, really nice about this - she was obviously very stressed out. I told her we would wait for her to sort it out.
A little while later, she comes out of the office (everyone had to wait outside because of COVID) and tells us that she has a full-size pick up truck that just came back in and she’ll let us take it for the same price. We said yes immediately, but then young man who was waiting about the same amount of time that we were was so excited about the idea of having a pickup that I agreed that we would swap places with him and wait for the next car and he could take the pick up. That felt like a really nice thing to do - I didn’t know how much that was going to F us over in the end.
After a long time, more cars were coming and going and the crowd outside of the place dwindled. Sondra and I were still sitting. Then they pulled up with a little Chevy Spark and I joked to Sondra that they better not offer us that car. Which is, of course, exactly what they did. Nope nope nope. I can’t pedal fast enough to get that thing to highway speed. So I told the young man who offered us the car that I had a reservation for a compact car, and that was an economy car. And he had the audacity to tell me that at Enterprise, they are the same thing. LOL. What? So then, absurdly, I had to open up their website and show him that there are two distinct groups of cars. He said yeah but the reservation says a Nissan Versa or similar, and this car is considered similar. We argued for several minutes about this because, while I was being nice, I wasn’t going to take some shitty little car that was a downgrade after I just let a premium pick up truck go just to be nice. He told me that I could pay an upgrade of $25 a day to move up to a midsize car instead of the compact car I had reserved. I was dumbfounded by this logic after I had just turned down a premium truck for the same price. I told him we would wait for them to sort it out but we were not taking that Spark. Then the girl came back to us all pissed off and said again that we didn’t have a reservation anymore because we weren’t there at 3 o’clock, and so she doesn’t have a car for us and too bad.
My dad taught me a long time ago that if you get lost in the woods, you just sit down and wait. This felt a lot like being lost in the “logic woods,” so I decided to just sit there and be present without making a scene about it. You can only ignore a couple of women sitting in a parking lot with a mound of luggage for so long. Or can you?
As the sun started to go down and every other customer besides us had driven away in their rental cars, it seemed like this little game of chicken wasn’t working out. Sondra started taking down staff names and I started tweeting to Enterprise corporate support.  I was honestly dumbfounded at what was happening. I mean, come on, I passed up a premium pick up truck to be a good sport. And now it was like F you lady?
The angry girl walked by and in passing said that her regional manager was going to drive a car there from a different location. She didn’t say what kind of car or how long it would take or anything, and then just walked inside and shut the door.
That was the straw. I was tired and hungry and I know Sondra was too. I’d had two hours of sleep and a really, really shitty couple of weeks leading up to that. My grandbaby moved away, I learned I need another shoulder surgery, and I’d been working 15-hour days for real. I just needed a little break, and there I was sitting in a darkening parking lot being treated like shit by a girl I had been really nice to. As the full moon rose up on the horizon, the tears just bubbled up and I started to cry.
This produced a fair amount of panic for Sondra, LOL, because she has never seen me cry over any traveling disaster ever, and we’ve seen a few.
Just then, the staff girl came outside and saw me crying and also panicked because - well, she’d made a nice, grown woman cry by being mean.
Also just then, a very sporty Elantra in my favorite shade of blue pulled up, driven by the regional manager. For some stupid reason, this just made me cry more. LOL. I have no explanation.
Anyway, the staff girl waived the extra driver charge and the gas charge and I don’t know what else, because I was just trying to find enough Kleenex to blow my nose. And then we drove away, with Sondra behind the wheel because I was still working on some composure.
One night in the cute Clearwater Beach community of Dunedin (go here!!), and then we were off down the coast to Manasota Key - blazing in a tricked-out indigo blue Elantra far nicer than the truck we passed up and for sure 100 times better than the Spark, which, as we were pulling out in the Elantra, was being driven back into the Enterprise parking lot by the guy they had talked into taking it after we turned it down. I feel you, buddy, but my good deeds are done for today.
Now... where is that sunshine?
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