Editorial: Lost in the Parking Lot- Part 2

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The Mt. Hope Scrolls

By Bobby Jonte

Day two with the rental car starts out okay. The car is parked right in front of the hotel and is easy to find. There is a slight inconvenience, though. When you push the key fob, (The thingamagigy) a horn does not blow. The lights flash. That’s okay but the lights are not bright. Also, we can’t decide if the car is white or grey. The color is like a lot of other cars in the parking lot but you can’t really decide what it really is.

We leave the parking lot and head out on our adventure. Traffic is an immediate problem. It’s Monday morning. The locals are driving to work and they are making it hard for us to abuse the rental car. (The locals will run over you.) We have to drive defensively because we are not sure where we are going and the locals are not letting us into the traffic flow. I’m trying to read a map, my driver is piddling with his phone and not watching the road signs so our progress is rather slow initially.

We make it out onto the highway and get to open up the rental car to just a little over the speed limit. Everybody else is going a lot over the speed limit. An hour later we arrive at our destination and are ushered into the giant parking lot at the venue. We are marshaled to a parking lot with big signs everywhere proclaiming we have parked in the Blue parking lot. That’s good. It appears that the blue parking lot is right in front of the main gate.

The day at the venue is fun. After the show, we head back to find the blue parking lot. Turns out that the blue parking lot is bigger than we thought the first thing in the morning. This is where the thingamagigy should come in handy. Go back a couple of paragraphs and see that a horn does not blow; only lights flash. Those dim little lights flash but we are in a big parking lot. Now we are searching for a white or grey car with little flashing lights. Fifteen minutes is not a long time. It seems like an eternity when you can’t find those flashing lights. Finally it gets dark enough to see those little flashing lights and we find the car.

We are off once again. It should be an easy trip back to the hotel. All you have to do is retrace your steps. Remember, he doesn’t read road signs. In a little while, we have missed a turn and are trying to read a map and get back on course. Now we have to read all the road signs and that is slowing us down. We head through strange towns and obey all the speed limits. We get back on the main highway and shortly, we are back close to our hotel.

That doesn’t help too much. We are still lost, but close to our hotel. We circle round and round trying to compare maps and phone apps all the while trying to cross the interstate. All this circling doesn’t help with trying to get maximum performance out of the rental car.

Like everything our adventure comes to an end. We get the car back to the rental company and we are gone. It was a shame though. We never got to run that car fast without any regard to road conditions or others around us. Traffic and not knowing where we were going really slowed us down. Too bad. We even paid for extra insurance.