Today, the 4th of July, we have begun our vacation. I sit in a hotel on a Friday night in a town I know almost nothing about, thankful that today's airline flights went as scheduled and that we can look forward to a good time.
Several months ago I made plans on Expedia, and when it came time to pick the rental car I chose the cheapest option, the Manager's Special. We don't really need anything too big for the three of us, I thought, so I figured this would be a good place to save a few bucks in the time of inflation.
I didn't think much about it until about 10 days ago, when I started getting emails from Hertz thanking for my rental, and oh by the way here's a bunch of reading you need to do about renting an EV from us. Zoinks?!! I went back and looked at my rental email and sure enough I had chosen not simply the Manager's Special but Manager's Special EV or similar. Over the next few days I started spending my free time reading up on EVs, having never driven one before, and really having no idea how the entire system worked. At first I was convinced that I was likely to get a Tesla; one reviewer online of the Hertz at the airport from which we would be renting complained about how he showed up to get his car and all they had left were a dozen Teslas.
My thinking soon turned to wondering how long it would be until somebody keyed my rental, or maybe set in on fire, as the liberals for whom they were designed soon began to resist the car given to them by a modern day Nazi. Maybe, I thought, I could put a sign in the window, PLEASE DON"T DESTROY IT'S A RENTAL I CAN'T AFFORD THE DEDUCTABLE. But surely the rage at the South African First Buddy was starting to fade.
Soon, though, as I began to read about the Tesla I started to realize that the bigger problem might be that moment like in a dystopian movie where I have to abandon it on the side of the road because of a lack of power charging. At the hotels we had rented I can't slow charge them overnight in a garage, and even as some of the areas we were going had Fast Chargers online reviews were saying that they didn't always work. Was my vacation going to center on sitting at slow charging stations for six hours so I would be able to be able to drive another 80 miles?
Then about three days ago I got another email from Hertz. Plan your route by expecting your Polestar 2 to go about 200 miles. A Polestar 2? What was that? A little research led me to realize it was simply a Volvo EV, with worse range. But also I quickly discovered that there were other EVs as well Hertz rented, a Chevy Bolt, a few Kias, who knows what else. How on earth was I going to digest all this information on EV charging and what different adapters one might need for each vehicle in certain situations?
I literally spent a dozen hours online researching all the permutations of this over the past week. But what's worse, even as I tried convincing myself (and others) that I was making peace with these things, my old worrying habit came back with a terrible kick to the nuts. Ever since this stuff all started, my pooping routine has been, shall we say, scattered. Where once I gave a few solid poops a day, I was going 6, even 8 times a day, and often with a consistency that looked more like chocolate syrup instead of a Baby Ruth. I wondered, maybe I'm suddenly lactose intolerant? Maybe I have stomach cancer? At least I wasn't getting the sores in my mouth that I used to get in times of stress; instead, the sores went into the lining of my stomach and intestines.
Worry does some bad stuff. And this doessn't even include this Guy thing I have in which I have to take charge, to help the wife and son have a good time, to make so many plans on my own. What really were we going to do on this trip? Maybe, just maybe, this is the last vacation, that I will be content to be like everyone else and just go to the lake all the time and sit around the same campfire and try to enjoy fishing. Bleh. And since Donnie Dimwit may well have declared himself emperor for his 38% of fawning supporters by this time next year even as the economy starts to look like my poop from this past week, we may well be more likely to be in hiding from feral ICE patrols than sitting on a beach or wandering along mountain streams in the near future.
So. Today our two flights go well, and we arrive at the Hertz rental counter with also doubles as the Thrifty and the Dollar rental counter. A large woman is running around trying to do several jobs at once, as she bore the brunt of corporate understaffing. Finally I get to talk to her...she gets my name and ID and I say as pathetically as possible, I made a mistake. I didn't mean to get an EV rental, is there anything else possible that I can drive. She says, honey, we don't even have any EVs for rent right now. Let me get you and your family into something.
In that moment everything changed. The worry and terror I had lived in for the past week and a half suddenly lifted. I'd use the regular analogy of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, but it's better to say that I could feel my bowels suddenly heal. We talked a bit, I said I hoped she had a good 4th, she said she was happy to work, it got her away from her kids for awhile. All was well.
We walked out into the parking garage and I went to my car, a Chevy Trailblazer with less than 2000 miles on it. The fanciest thing in the world? No. But as my first car was a Chevy, I know how to drive these things, and don't plan to spend my evening meticulously planning a trip around where charging stations might need to be on my map.
The world can be a nerve-wracking thing. America may not make it to its 250th year, but why worry? After resting up tonight, our adventures start tomorrow. All is good.
