Sometimes, the best laid plans really do go quite awry. And if they have the opportunity to spin terribly out of control in a foreign country, then of course, there is every chance that they will.
Last month, we traveled to London and arrived on a Sunday morning. None of us had slept on the flight, we were exhausted and still had to clear Customs and find the train to the station that would lead us to our hired car. (Not a “rental car” mind you, don’t dare say such a thing). After running through the streets in the rain with our luggage, we found ourselves pounding on the shuttered doors and windows of the car hire that had closed 22 minutes earlier (our plane was 37 minutes delayed, by the way). In a stroke of good luck, the annoyed man opened up so that we could retrieve the vehicle we had already paid for. He handed us the keys, and then spoke his curse:”It’s a brand new Mercedes that I’m giving you.”
Please don’t give me a brand new Mercedes to rent. Not with my lovely but very American fiancè driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. But, the Mercedes was ours, and we still had a four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead, so I stuffed down my misgivings and hunkered down for the brutal drive north.
Rain. Endless rain. Drizzling, sideways rain, sunshowers, blowing storming gales. England, especially Northern England in March seems to consist entirely of different types of rain. The silver lining is the gorgeous, almost blinding emerald green pastures and bright lily-pad green moss covering the rocks and trees in the countryside. But it makes for uncomfortable walking about – and dangerous driving.
One morning, we had driven to a nearby village, a little shopping and sightseeing, promises of a castle and crumbly old buildings for us Americans to ooh and aah over properly. But as luck would have it, the antique stores were closed until midweek, the castle didn’t open to visitors until April and the very swanky pub we’d thought we’d found ended up being a chain. We climbed back into the car, in the rain, of course, and set the car’s navigation for our bed and breakfast address.
Now, these little villages have lots of winding, narrow, funky roads. Some are unmarked private drives, some are little half-streets with bollards appearing after you turn the bend, warning you a little too late that there is no outlet. It was one of these we turned down, on accident, misreading the navigation. It was one of these we had to reverse back up the entire way, that hooked over slightly on one side, where a rambling ancient house bowed out awkwardly with no rhyme or reason; a house against which we scraped the back left of the brand new Mercedes.
Scratches, a small dent. Small, but not small enough to qualify as “normal wear and tear” by the rental company. We took it to a garage in a nearby town where a round, older man with an almost indecipherable Yorkshire accent gave us the equivalent of a shoulder shrug and said he was busy through April.
Our brand new rented Merc was marked – £1,075 was going down the drain, washed from my credit card like the Yorkshire rain down the car windows. We let it bother us the rest of the day, and then allowed the barman at the local (walkable) pub to pour away those sorrows with a few gin and tonics. A lesson learned, a story to share and hopefully, fully reimbursed by my credit card insurance.
Our best laid plans had certainly gone off track, but what else could we expect – as they’d been laid on the other side of the road, the other side of the car.
