Friday of the Thanksgiving weekend, I and my adventurous
friend, just back from four months in the wilderness—let’s call him Wilderness Man—decided
to go on a road trip that included a stop at his family cottage in eastern
Ontario and a hike in to my isolated property on a picturesque river. All we
had to do was pick up a rental car and drive a few hours northeast.
But the two rental agent guys claimed I was not “in the
system” even though I knew I had booked a car. And of course there were no
spare cars floating around on such a busy weekend. Patience is not a virtue I
possess, so I hounded the rental agents to keep checking. There was not a trace
of my online booking.
“I can prove I made the reservation,” I said. As well as patience, however, I also do not
possess a smartphone, which I could have used to look through my old emails and
find the confirmation. I needed to go home.
“Take the shuttle,” one of the guys told me, gesturing to a
van that had pulled up outside.
At that moment, Wilderness Man arrived, and I had to
sheepishly brief him on the screw-up. I promised I’d be back in a minute with
the confirmation number.
Back home, I pulled up my emails and found my car rental confirmation,
noting with horror that it was for the following Friday.
I had to then ignominiously return to the car rental agency and
admit to all three guys that I had massively screwed up and booked the wrong
weekend.
Plan B was to find another rental agency with a spare car. None
were to be found anywhere near the GTA, nor along the 401 corridor all the way
to Kingston. Then Wilderness Man pointed to Barrie on my old-fashioned paper map.
And there actually was a car available in Barrie—it just meant going completely
out of our way in the wrong direction.
Wilderness Man and I lugged
all our gear along Front Street to Union Station. I observed that we both had
more stuff than either one of us would have taken on a one-year trip around the
world.
On the Go bus, it was a two-hour trip north through farm
country to the downtown Barrie bus terminal. We had no idea where the car
rental office was, and suspected it would not be nearby. Wilderness Man refuses
to buy a cell phone because he spends half the year off the grid, and I have a
cheapie that does not let me Google anything. So we were stuck in 1999.
I approached an idling cab, mispronouncing the street name
where the Barrie car rental place was located. After repeating the street name
numerous times, only to be observed with puzzlement by the cabbie, I approached
the next one in line and got the same response. The two cabbies conferred and
tried to decipher our destination. At last they hit on the right pronunciation.
Triumph!
As expected, the rental agency was a $20 cab ride, far away
in the distant suburbs in the middle of an ugly strip mall.
“Why would anyone out here need to rent a car?” Wilderness
Man mused. “They all have cars and would have to drive here to rent a car. It
doesn’t make sense.”
“Never mind, it works in our
favour,” I said.
“People must come here just to rent moving
vans,” he wisely concluded.
We hit the road and started driving north and then east. We
were at this point about four hours behind schedule.
“Just think,” I said, “If I hadn’t booked the wrong date,
we’d be at the cottage by now!”
The journey east went without incident, except in a small
town when I pulled out in front of a large pickup truck that came speeding out
of nowhere, the driver angrily blowing the horn. For some reason, I found this
hilarious, and perversely delighted in driving at exactly 80 kph on the highway,
with the pickup driver fuming behind me.
At twilight we pulled off the highway and drove a short
distance to a small cottage community. Wilderness Man’s family cottage was
right on the lake, and the sun was just starting to sink down below the trees,
flooding the lake with pink.
“It’s beautiful!” I exclaimed.
As I unloaded the car, I heard Wilderness Man fumbling with
the lock.
“What’s going on?” I joked. “Don’t
tell me the key’s not working….?”
“It’s not,” he replied.
We stood there for a second, taking in the immensity of the
problem.
“I have no break and enter skills!” I said. Wilderness Man pulled
out a bank card and tried to move the dead bolt with it. It didn’t budge. Then
we circumnavigated the cottage, attempting to jimmy open every window and
standing helplessly in front of them, looking blankly at these insurmountable
barriers. There just seemed no way of breaking into the cottage.
“It always looks so easy in the movies,” Wilderness Man commented.
We knew we’d have success if we just threw a rock through the door window, but the
problem with that idea was that it would result in a smashed-in window…
Wilderness Man suddenly realized there might be a spare key
at the second cottage his family owned just up the road. Of course, this
entailed trying to figure out how to get into that cottage without a key, but
after a lot of searching in the dark, we eventually found one hidden somewhere.
And once inside, Wilderness Man phoned his mother, who told him where the spare
key was for cottage #1. We were in!
To get home on Sunday night, we were supposed to drive back
to Barrie and then take the Go bus to Toronto. This seemed like such a dumb
idea that we decided to drive to Toronto and pay the extra fee. As we drove
west along the 401, gaggles of Canada Geese flew above us in rag-tag flocks,
heading north, which was completely the wrong direction, honking at each other.
They weren’t even in proper V formations and they appeared confused and
unfocused. I was really happy to see that in nature there are always screw-ups
and therefore my own problems with numbers are just part of nature.
