I want my tombstone to have one simple epitaph. It would go like this. “Give him a break. He couldn’t have made this stuff up”.
Like the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve been everywhere man” says, I’ve been everywhere, man I’ve been everywhere, man Crossed the deserts bare, man I’ve breathed the mountain air, man Of travel I’ve had my share, man I’ve been everywhere … I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota
Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota
Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma
Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma
Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo
Tocapillo, Baranquilla, and Perdilla, I’m a killer … I’ve been everywhere, man
I’ve been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I’ve had my share, man
I’ve been everywhere … I’ve been to Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana
Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana
Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa
Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa
Tennessee to Tennesse Chicopee, Spirit Lake
Grand Lake, Devils Lake, Crater Lake. I’ve been to those places and do I have the stories to tell that comes from spending life on the road! Another one of those stories landed in my lap this past Friday night up in rural Michigan. I’ll share the punch line first. A fella I met during this weekend’s trip asked me this question. “Earlier tonight did you expect to be riding for three hours in the back seat of a 20-year old used up Subaru at three o’clock in the morning with two 18-year-olds from the reservation, that you had never met, on the lonely backroads in the U.P. of Michigan?” Yes, this happened. You might be wondering how it came to pass.
The night before I had picked up a rental car in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. I almost always rent Toyota Camrys. For this trip, there were no Toyotas available. That being the case I selected a bright red Honda Accord hybrid. After driving it for a couple of hundred miles it seemed like a pretty nice car. The gas gauge told me I was getting 45 miles per gallon. Just 24 hours later I was no longer praising this Honda. I had driven the gas gauge down until the low fuel light went on. I always do that. That’s what they do in NASCAR races for a competitive advantage. This strategy was a little riskier in rural upstate Michigan. They don’t have a lot of gas stations up this way. I thought I was pretty lucky at nearly midnight to find a lone gas station in Bruce Crossing, Michigan that was open. I stopped and filled my tank. Then I walked into the convenience store part of the gas station to buy something to drink for the rest of my drive down to my hotel in Wausau, Wisconsin. This was all pretty routine. I’ve done this the very same way hundreds, if not thousands of times.
My car was parked at the gas pump. With an ice-cold Gatorade Zero in hand, I got in the car and pressed the starter button. Nothing happened. I looked around and thought for a bit. Was I doing something different than when I had started the car over the past 24 hours.? I didn’t think so. I get my rental cars from National Car Rental. I think the National product and their customer service and their systems and their prices are fantastic. I rent more than 50 cars with these folks every year. I’ve done that for at least a couple of decades. I’ve had a few problems with National rental cars over time. Some of those issues were not the fault of the car but of animals that frequent our nation’s highways (above outside of Denver likely coyote encounter). Once in a while, the car just failed. That always surprises me because I rarely get a car with more than 20,000 miles on the odometer. Tonight’s Honda Civic had been driven just 7,000 miles. It was a baby.
I do know this from experience. When I have a problem like I had tonight it’s going to take a while to get service. First of all, it was now nearly midnight. Secondly, I was in Bruce Crossing, Michigan a town of just 184 people. Bruce Crossing might not be at the end of the world but you can see it from there! I wasn’t close to any other town that was much bigger and I certainly wasn’t close to any airports. I had a problem. I also had a nonrefundable reservation at a hotel that was three hours away. And…I had a car that wouldn’t start.
My first plan was to go back into the convenience store and explain my problem to the owner. One of their employees brought out his little Chevy four-cylinder and tried to jump-start my car. No dice. Then he asked one of the customers who had just filled up his huge pickup truck to help. He tried to jumpstart the car and again no luck.
I had already placed a call to National Car Rental’s roadside service. They told me that a tow truck might be able to get there to try to help in 90 minutes. Ninety minutes! At about that time the gas station operator came out with an important message. He told me he was closing at midnight. All the lights were going to be turned off. I sat in my car and thought. While I was sitting in the driver’s seat and not touching any of the controls whatsoever the hybrid engine miraculously started running. That was weird. I thought I might just luck out and be able to drive on down to my hotel without further assistance. As that thought passed through my brain the car just as mysteriously stopped running. About 10 minutes later the engine did the same thing by turning itself on randomly and then turning itself off on an equally random basis. All during this 90-minute waiting period, I was getting calls from different people at National. All of the calls were from women. I’m not sure that was a material fact. But it was a fact. They were very sincere and had heartfelt suggestions. One of them insisted on calling me “Mr. Randy”. It was just from my experience of being broken down on the road in remote locations like this in the past that I knew that virtually none of their suggestions were going to happen. There would be no Uber driver miraculously showing up in Bruce Crossing, Michigan. There would be no easy access to a tow truck at this time of night. There just wasn’t going to be any help at what was now becoming 1 a.m. I told National that I just wanted them to arrange for me to get some transportation down to my hotel which was well over 100 miles away. I told them they could pick up their rental car whenever they had the opportunity. I didn’t want to wait for a tow truck to come and take the car away and then start the process of trying to get some transportation to my hotel. For the most part everyone I talked to understood. It’s just that their suggestions were not realistic.
Importantly what I found was that I was getting calls from different sources and different people at National. None of them really knew what the other was doing. Then when I had to call back, I would get another generic customer service rep and had to get them up to speed from scratch on the issue. That’s tiring after you do it five or six times in the early morning hours. Their left hand did not know what their right hand was doing!!
All this time I was sitting at the gas pumps in a totally dark gas station parking lot in a town of 184 people. Being a positive thinker after nearly 90 minutes had passed, I was expecting to see a flatbed truck show up at any moment. At just about the 90-minute mark a small foreign sedan that looked pretty well beat up pulled next to my dead-in-the-water car and stopped within two feet of my front bumper. Inside was a young man driving and a young woman in the passenger seat. What were these folks up to? This wasn’t the flatbed truck I was expecting. I didn’t know who these people were but it didn’t really look good. I was hoping my tow truck driver might come along and try to help me avoid whatever confrontation might come from the Subaru.
The young man in the Subaru got out of his car and without saying a word reaches into the backseat. The hood was up on my car. Next, the guy pulls a portable battery charger from the backseat and again without saying a word attempts to start jump-starting my car. That was actually a relief. He wasn’t here to rob or accost me. He was actually part of the “help” team although his manner was anything but friendly. I got out of my car to say hello. We both soon found out that his jumpstarting efforts were not going to work. The battery meter displayed on my car’s instrument panel seemed to indicate that the battery was in fine shape. It must have been something else causing the problem.
I knew this. My car was not going to be towed any place with this guy’s 2001 Subaru. There was no way I was going to wait for an official tow truck to show up at this stage. The guy driving the Subaru who I will call Devin, not his real name, told me that he WAS the tow truck driver. If they needed a flatbed, he would have to drive an hour back to where he had come from to get it. Then drive an hour back toward the gas station. Nope. That plan would not work for me. I explained to Devin that the “National people” had told me that the tow truck driver would either get my car started or drive me to my hotel, three hours one-way, in Wausau, Wisconsin. You may know where I’m going with this. This was new news to Devin the tow truck driver. It was now pushing 2 a.m. I was asking a guy in a beat-up Subaru who had probably already worked all day and who had already driven an hour to check out the problem with my car to drive me three more hours to my hotel. My hotel’s location would put him four hours from where he had come from originally. Folks, that’s a tough sell.
I did have money on my side. Not necessarily my money but money just the same. It’s never a bad idea to have money on your side. Does money really “talk”? Maybe not but money can make people “listen”.
I could tell that Devin wasn’t all that interested in making this unplanned drive. I could also tell he was doing the financial calculations in his mind and possibly concluding that this could be a profitable adventure for him. Money can be a great motivator at times! The entire situation was just a little bit comical if you can think of comedy in situations like this. I watched Devin walk over to explain the “new plan” to his girlfriend who was still seated in the Subaru. I’ll call her Dorie, again not her real name. I could see the eye contact they were making when he said something to the effect of “Hey honey, we have to take this old guy down to Wausau and then drive back to our house which is going to take us seven or eight hours. We won’t get back until the sun has already come up.” The young woman’s reaction was pretty much the same as I’ve seen a time or two from my beautiful wife when I shared the kind of news Devin was sharing with Dorie. Soon the final arrangements were made. We would leave the National Car Rental Racing Honda Accord parked at the gas pumps. I piled about six bags worth of stuff that I had already separated in my rental car into the trunk of the Subaru. This included a rapidly leaking Angels’ ice-filled cooler bag. Devon would drive. Dorie would ride in the front passenger seat. I was relegated to the rear seat with legroom available for a person about a foot shorter than me. Off we went. Both Devon and Dorie to a lesser degree were sneezing their heads off. I asked if they were sick. No, they told me. They were both allergic to cats. At one point I counted 12 consecutive sneezes from Devin. Then I was a little surprised that Dorie, also allergic to cats, told me that she was interested in becoming a veterinarian!
Over the next nearly three hours we drove on upstate Michigan’s rural two-lane roads. I could see deer staring at us just off the highway every few hundred yards for the entire trip. As time passed the three of us actually had a good time talking, learning about each other, and sharing stories during the drive. Remember there was at least a two-generation difference in our ages and experience base. At one point Devin said to me, “Did you ever expect to be in a car with two 18-year-olds driving on these roads tonight?” The obvious answer to that question was absolutely no clue.
At one point Devin looked up at the rearview mirror and said “We’ve got a cop following us”. I asked him how he knew that. He said when he drove by a car parked on the side of the highway the car didn’t have its lights on. Then Devin saw the headlights come on and the car pulled onto the road and tailed us. That cop must have followed us for the next 10 miles. Devin kept saying “I wasn’t doing anything wrong so we can’t really get in trouble”. However, at that point, Dorie piped up with, “Well, you WERE speeding”. I told him that I figured the reason he was following us for so long was that he was running the plates to see if there were any outstanding issues. That’s when Dori said, “Yes he probably noticed our plates are from the reservation”. “Reservation?” I asked. “Yes,” Devin said, “We live on the reservation”. I asked if they were Native Americans. They confirmed they were. You hear a lot of unusual and often sad stories about police stopping motorists. I didn’t exactly like the narrative of two 18-year-old Native Americans transporting a 73-year-old white man in the middle of a national forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at three o’clock in the morning. What could possibly go wrong, right? Luckily, the copper finally passed us and drove on down the road.
I would come to learn that Dorie was all set to go off to college and get set up in her dormitory on Sunday. Devin had some military-style courses that he needed to complete tomorrow morning before he enrolled in a Florida-based online college course. His major? He would be working in the video game industry. I needed to get to my hotel. Like most folks, we all need to get somewhere, right? I wanted to get to the hotel as quickly as I could. Tonight’s little bump in the road was not what I had been expecting. Devin told me that he worked seven days a week for the tow truck company and was on call 24/7. We talked about some of his experiences with showing up at the scene of major traffic accidents to remove debris and crumpled cars. He said some of those experiences will stick with you for “a couple of years”. He was only eighteen. I’m sure they would.
I entertained them (my words) with my own travel stories. I told him about the time a taxi driver had me drive his taxi around the block a few times in downtown Minneapolis on a busy Friday afternoon while the taxi driver tried to deliver a package to a skyscraper. I told them about the time we kidnapped one of our fraternity active members and tried to drop him off at our national headquarters at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. That was the time we each took one brick from the fraternity’s construction site at four o’clock in the morning as a souvenir. That got us hauled off to jail by sheriff Ralph T. Jones who was very effective at scaring the daylights out of us with our future potential criminal records. I told them about my National Car Rental Racing Toyota Camry breaking down on the interstate in Youngstown, Ohio. Then when the state police officer came by to give me a ride, he had me spread-eagle over the hood of the squad car (actual car above) to search me for weapons for as he said “both of our personal safeties”. Considering we were a 73-year-old and two 18-year-olds we actually had a good time. In a way, they were both sort of like our grandchildren when they were young. They kept saying you’ve got such great stories tell us some more. This was not unlike my youngest grandchild Ceci asking for me to read her another story. Devin had to stop at one point to take a pee. They both kept sneezing and sniffling incessantly. Yes, it was all sort of surreal but in a real way!
At one point I saw Dorie pass a calculator over to Devin. I could see the end result of a calculation that read “$211”. Devin held up the calculator and turned around and said, “This is going to be my biggest payday ever. The towing charges will come to a little bit more than $700 and I get 30% of that”. I told him I was happy for him. I wished it was more. I had gotten conflicting information about what I should do with the car keys of my disabled rental car. One person told me to hold onto the keys and give them to the Enterprise rental location near my hotel tomorrow morning. The other person told me to give the car keys to the tow truck driver. Devin and I agreed that I would give the keys to him when we parted ways at my hotel. However, in the rush of activity at 4 o’clock in the morning when we did arrive at my hotel in Wausau, I forgot to give him the keys. They were in my pocket when I woke up Saturday morning.
When it was time to say goodbye to Devin and Dorie, we took a selfie. It was my pleasure to meet them. I think they enjoyed the old guy in the backseat just as much as I enjoyed them. I told Devin and Dorie I was going to tell you about our time together. They seemed pleased with that notion. Oh yeah. I gave Devin a very strong tip to supplement his $211 record tow truck payday. Every minute of tonight’s delay was one less minute I could sleep in my hotel room. My wake-up call was going to come at 8 a.m. no matter what time I got to bed. I ended up getting about four hours of sleep. Then I got on the phone with National to arrange some transportation to the nearest Enterprise location, the parent company of National. They were the only nearby location that would be open this morning.
Of course, as you would come to expect the morning’s transportation plan did not run smoothly. There were no Uber drivers available. I called a taxi. Finally, a woman did show up. She was a kindly person who was also a big smoker. When I get home Carol will ask me where I got the smoke smell on my clothes. The woman proceeded to tell me about a large number of speeding tickets that she had gotten. I was impressed. Soon we were at the Enterprise rental car location in Wausau, Wisconsin. It started to pour down rain. I would expect nothing less.
I had picked this particular Enterprise location because they were the only place anywhere close to my hotel that was opening at 9 a.m. I needed to get a replacement car and I needed to get it fast. I had appointments with folks this afternoon and a race this evening down in Illinois another six-hour drive away. The woman checking me in at Enterprise had some concerns. First, they couldn’t locate my disabled rental car! They didn’t know if it had been picked up or not. The Enterprise agent really didn’t want to rent me a car when my original car was still not “accounted for”. I had that same problem up in Quebec, Canada during a winter snowstorm rental car collapse. That’s another story but one of my best.
When we seemed to get past that hurdle, I shared the news that I still had the car keys to my first rental car. This seemed to shock the agent. She told me, “We’ve never had to go three hours to pick up a car anywhere in the past”. All I could do was shrug my shoulders.
The agent ended up giving me a Hyundai Accent replacement car this morning. It’s smaller and doesn’t have a lot of the conveniences I’m used to. The good thing is that it can get me from point A to point B. That was important right now. If I learned one thing from all of the travel adventures and obstacles that I’ve countered over the years it is this. “Keep flying the airplane”. What does that mean? Keep trying to achieve the objective until time runs out or you cross the finish line. That’s a pretty important lesson in life. During the course of our late-night drive with Devin and Dorie, I asked Devin an important question. I asked, “What kinds of people do you encounter in the tow truck business? Are they usually nice?” He told me that when he shows up to help his customers with their disabled vehicles or accident-damaged cars they are usually stressed. He told me that as a generalization people were not very nice. I guess that didn’t surprise me given their situation. We talked about the need to be nice to people in all situations. I told him about my theory that a person’s character is really judged by how well they treat people when no one else is looking. When you encounter the hotel maid do you show him or her respect? When it’s just you and the convenience store cashier do you make eye contact and smile and thank them for whatever courtesy they may have shown you? Do you open doors for people just because you can? I mentioned there might be someone above looking down or it might be just your own “inner self” watching your behavior and judging whether or not you did the right thing. Devin nodded his head, between sneezes, in agreement. He understood. Most of us hang around people who look like us, who are about the same age as us, and who think along the same lines as we do. I know that is the case for me. I’ll bet that might be the case for you as well. I rarely get to spend three uninterrupted hours with a couple of 18-year-olds who just happen to be Native American and come from extremely small towns. “Not often?” That NEVER happens to me! I don’t have much in common with that lifestyle. Was it an extreme hassle to have the rental car problem I had? Yes, it was. Did the problem cut into my sleep a good deal? Yes, it did. Did I have any regrets meeting up with Devin and Dorie? Absolutely not. One of the biggest highlights of my year and certainly a big highlight of this particular trip was getting the opportunity to spend three hours with Devin and Dorie. I would love to have been a fly on the side window of that beat-up 20-year-old Subaru on their drive back. I would love to have heard what they had to say about the entire experience that we all had. It was my honor and my pleasure to be part of this story with them. I do what I do for the story. Devin and Dorie were a big part of tonight’s story.
When I got back to the airport in Chicago the National Car Rental agent asked me how the car had been. I used just one word to describe my rental car experience. “Terrible,” I told her. O.K. already. It hadn’t really been terrible. However, you need to begin a negotiation from a position of strength.
This started a condensed conversation covering what you have just read. The agent was so sympathetic to my plight that she lowered my three-day rental car bill from $200 to $28. That was nice. I’ll still call National customer service just to share my feedback when I get home. What’s the real purpose of that call? O.K. you got me. Maybe they will throw in some future free days for the trouble I endured. Oh…one more thing. At this trip’s end I landed back in Los Angeles at 4 a.m. on Monday morning. My flight was delayed four hours. I would have expected nothing less from this weekend’s trip.
I had a message on my phone. National Car Rental was calling. Their message was simple. They had called the gas station where I had left my rental car. The car wasn’t there anymore. The agent wanted to know if I knew what had happened to the car. Folks, I can’t make this stuff up.
