Warning! The Jones' are coming!

I've decided that we as a society have some pretty messed up priorities. Two weeks ago my sister was in a car accident on the I-215. After it was determined that it was not her fault, the party at fault's insurance has sprung for a rental car until the damage could be assessed. It has now come back that they car is going to be totaled. (the price to repair the deployed airbags alone was $1500) The reason this affects me is that I had been using this vehicle in my travelings for work. On Monday I got to try out the rental. It is a Chevy Cobalt with an extremely nice stereo system. The speakers rock and it has a CD player. On the dash is one of the fun things to tell you what the exterior temperature is. The odd thing about this car is that it does not have power locks or power windows. To unlock the back doors you literally have to reach back and pull up the lever. As for the windows even my car which is 9 years old and has no CD player, has power windows. Now it could just be that I've gotten lazy, but I don't want to sit there and crank down the window. Thankfully it is not my vehicle.

I should mention also that I think my family should come with some kind of warning label. A flashing sign that warns people we are coming, or some kind of advance person with a bull horn. Let me explain. Anyone who knows me or any member of my family knows that we have a pretty odd sense of humor. We are also masters of the deadpan. Just the other day I fooled my roommate who has been a good friend for at least 2 years into thinking that I didn't know Jurassic Park was fake. To obtain the rental vehicle my dad, sister and brother went to the rental agency (shortly after stripping the old vehicle of anything and everything valuable.) The lady at the rental agency was explaining the rules; no smoking, no pets, no drag racing, and the vehicle was not to be used as a getaway car. At this point my brother acted all dejected and said, "Well, there goes my weekend." And of course none of them are cracking a smile or laughing so this lady was thinking maybe he was serious. A little later my sister mentions that it's too bad we don't have a jungle to abandon the rental car in. * See explanation Yep, that poor lady didn't know what to say so she feigned ignorance.

Explanation: My family has really bad luck with rental cars. There is no specific agency or country that this applies to because we have tried different agencies and not always in the USA. Once when traveling to California we had reserved one of those big passenger vans that you see prisoners transported in. (not an entirely unlikely use for us) When we got to the agency they didn't have any and so we ended up having to drive two suburbans instead. (Back when gas was only $1.19) The same problem happened a few years later with another agency and so we ended up shoving 8 adults (and if you know my family, I've got some large in stature brothers and a similar brother-in-law) into one single suburban. It was seriously the worst car trip EVER as far as comfort went. But the best one of all happened when we went to Cancun for Christmas one year. There were seven of us in a suburban, but I was probably 14 so space was not an issue for us yet. We had spent the day somewhere around Cancun snorkeling and were heading back to our hotel/suite. It had gotten dark and all we had taken with us was our swim gear. (We even had matching tye dye shirts, I kid you not) Halfway through our 90 minute return trip the car breaks down on the highway. So here we are in swimsuits, T-shirts and towels. It is pitch dark, there is not much traffic and did I mention the highway was smack dab in the middle of the jungle? And the problem is not a tire or something fixable, the car just sucks. And we have no cell service. So in my naivete I am expecting to have our tires stolen out from underneath us or to be attacked by a large beast from the jungle which is a foot from my window. My dad gets out and puts the little triangle markers that semi's use back behind us so that if in fact anyone happens upon us they will have ample warning and won't sideswipe us. Hoping to attract more attention, my dad commandeered my brother's neon cover your eyes yellow shirt, so that he can try and wave someone down. So at this point we are wondering how we are going to get back. And I can't remember what else had happened, but this was not the only problem we had had with this vehicle. Luckily a friendly hotel resort bus driver happened along and offered us a ride. No one was on the bus and my parents were both so mad at the rental company that we emptied all of our stuff out of the vehicle and loaded it in the bus. The nice gentleman took us back to our hotel and the next morning my dad let the rental agency know the general area where they could find the car if it was still there, because we were not going back to it. (The point of all that was to explain why my sister would be disappointed that we couldn't abandon the rental in the jungle. Although I don't know how much she remembers because if I was 14 she was only 7.)