Car Rental Confusion: Adventures of the Rentally-Challenged

The bane of every traveler's journey awaits him at the end of his or her flight, not unlike the bar bill that awaits the father of the bride after his daughter's wedding, or the extra seven pounds that greets you in the mirror at the end of a vacation cruise. It's called renting a car. It is the one bump in the road on the otherwise smooth and sunny highway to vacationland. It is the dark rain cloud that looms between you and your vacation destination. It is the thorn in the foot of the happy camper. It is the DMV of where happiness usually lives.

Without the routine car rental experience, vacations would be as rote and predictable as a celebrity murder trial verdict.

My husband is a savvy traveler, spending hours on the Internet planning each trip's final detail down to what brand of mint will be placed on the hotel pillow at night. But when it comes to renting a vehicle to use for the duration of our trip, he is suddenly struck with a mysterious syndrome that travel experts refer to as Car Rental Confusion, or CRC for short. It begins as soon as the last piece of luggage is plucked from the luggage carousel at the airport.

"Where the hell is the car rental?" he begins to mutter to no one in particular and starts to pace about the airport like a caged bobcat.

It's not that he needs to rent a car. Being the consummate prepared traveler that he is, he has already rented one over the Internet. He just never inquired where to pick it up. It usually takes up to a half hour of exploring the airport before the realization sinks in that the rental agency is not actually physically located at the airport like they used to be in the old days.

After we find the courtesy shuttle that take us to the car rental lot, we locate our vehicle and my husband grunts his way into the small economy car and the conversation always goes exactly like this: "Jesus, who drove this car last, one of the Munchkins?" Then, fiddling with the console, "Where the heck are the headlights on this thing?" "Oops, that's the windshield washer!"