For the Next 3 weeks Transfromation

As I said for the Next 3 weeks, I am turning this blog into a Travel Log of my trip to South Africa with footage and stuff each day of the trip. So you can look forward to that if that is what you do.
So let's start with why I will never try to rent a car from Hertz.

We reserved a car from Hertz, Mom and I worked for Hertz about 16 years ago and they seemed to still be a solid car rental.

Times have changed. 

We had some issues with pick up and drop off times, the plan was to rent the car, drive it to IAD (Dulles Airport) and drop the car there before flying out. what kept getting us, was if we rented the car for 2 days (48 hours) it would be about $260 but since I was working Monday and had a therapy appointment that gave us a narrow window for picking up the car (none of their locations are close to our house (30-40 miles) but we settle on the closest which was west knoxville (turned out to be in a strip mall. 

So this morning we headed down early and arrive at Hertz in Windsor Square shopping Center and found Hertz squashed between the Dollar Theater and a vacated store. 

The interior was decorated after the fashion of FBI front operations where you have a bare room with no signs and several desks and a few computers and 2 employees.

They were lackluster to put it nicely.

Also, it turned out they did not have the Full Size Sedan we had reserved.

In fact outside of the employee cars their "lot" looked a lot like this.

"But we have a Prius on the way in."

I had never laid eyes on a Prius so I agreed to wait and inspect it.

Tada!

This meme is fairly accurate as to my thought about the car.

I did not even try to get in that tin can on wheels.

It would be tight on Hobbits.

So I asked him if they had ANYTHING ELSE 

nope, nada, not a damn thing.

"This seldom ever happens to us."

He kept saying, but while he was apologetic, he did not offer any alternatives.

When I asked about the website reservation, he compared it to an airline as if that would explain why the website would say they had cars whereas the actual stores did not. 

The end of this irony was:

"No sir, none of our Knoxville Branches currently have any cars available"

and

a shrug when my mother asked about another car rental company.

and that was Hertz.

So I drove my mother and my cousin who had come to take my mother home to Enterprize which has a downtown office/branch.

Turns out while their building also looked a bit like a CIA Front operation, they did in fact, have plenty of cars to rent and we got a car at a better rate than good old Hertz.

So we are driving off to DC in a very roomy Nissan Altima that is first class as far as I am concerned in the morning.

Hopefully drop off will be straightforward 

and that is renting cars according to Mike.