“RENTING A CAR IN SPAIN” or “MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY MUST DIE”

Renting a car in Spain is a very important topic. Honestly, I can’t tell you the number of cards and letters we have gotten, all from readers asking what it is like to rent a car in Spain.

That’s not true. I could tell you, but I prefer that you imagine a huge number. Remember that scene in Miracle on 34th Street? The one where ten men file into a courtroom, each carrying two mail sacks packed full of letters to Santa? I’m going to say that we have received even more correspondence than that. Each and every letter and postcard that I insist we received includes a demand to know what it is like to rent a car in Spain.

You doubt my word? You doubt a fellow American? That is like spitting on the American flag! I question your patriotism!

I hope we can put that bit of ugliness behind us. We all need to come together. White and Black. Democrats and Republicans. Gay and Straight. Nebraska football fans and sane people.

It’s funny you should mention football. American football is a lot like cars. People form irrational attachments to both. Let’s face it. The only differences between an avid Hawkeye fan and a dedicated Husker fan is that the Hawkeye fan tends to be better looking and more intelligent. Both, however, are irrational in their commitment to a group of young men they do not know. People are equally irrational about their automobiles.

You doubt me? Spend an hour in the lounge of an old folks home. Listen to the residents talk about their resentments. The single most common complaint is that their children won’t let them drive. Those darn kids, barely in their 60’s but they think they know everything! They don’t realize how an experienced driver can make accommodations for blindness, dementia and reflexes only slightly slower than those of a South American tree sloth!

And that’s what I’m talking about. Emotion getting in the way of reason. In this case, it’s an emotional attachment to automobiles. An attachment that begins during our teenage years.

Driving is a rite of passage. It is freedom from the ever present judgment of parents who don’t really understand us, don’t trust our judgment, and don’t remember what it was like to be young. With a car we can be in the company of bad influences and we can drink beer and smoke pot and make out and be bad influences ourselves. Heck, when you think about it, the most surprising thing would be a human being who did not form an emotional attachment to driving cars.

I, on the other hand, have voluntarily relinquished my keys and am glad to be rid of them. I have no love for a money sucking device that regularly requires oil and grease and tires and in spite of all I do for it will from time to time go out of its way to make me miserable.

Consider, for example, my last car. A Lincoln. I spend thousands of dollars, always taking it in for prescribed maintenance, always ahead of schedule. And what does it do to repay me? It waits until the hottest day in August when I am crossing eastern Colorado and all of Nebraska and it shuts down the air conditioner. But then, just before I get it to the Lincoln dealership, it turns the AC back on! “We’re so sorry Mr. Stageman, we can’t diagnose a problem if there are no symptoms.”

The car was diabolical. It would allow the AC to run for several hours – too long for the dealership to recreate the problem. Then, when I am on a blistering hot highway bordered by cacti – off goes the air conditioning.

You’ve seen the Lincoln commercials starring that smug dope smoking Matthew McConaughey? He has never said a word about Lincoln’s malevolent air conditioning, has he? No he has not! In fact, nothing said on those commercials makes any sense. It’s all just jibber jabber, playing on humans’ emotional connection to automobiles.

But I have no emotional attachment to cars. Nor to football. If you are a fan of Westworld you know that none of those HBO robots ever said word one about either football or automobiles. Westworld robots don’t care about football or cars. I don’t care about football or cars. There is an obvious conclusion, but don’t worry. We robots do not want to harm humans. Except maybe Matthew McConaughey.

My wife, however, clearly is a human being. She likes cars. She likes driving cars. She likes going places in cars. She gets an emotional charge whenever she is behind the wheel. She said we should rent a car in Spain.

She said we need a car to move from our temporary apartment to our new condo. I observed that we came to Spain with only four large suitcases and two small ones, all of them on wheels. The new apartment is maybe 100 yards from the old one. In less than an hour I could walk all our belongings from one space to the other. Renting a car, on the other hand, would involve walking to the tram station (fifteen minutes), taking a tram to Alicante (forty-five minutes), catching a bus to the airport (forty-five minutes), dealing with car rental paperwork (thirty minutes), then driving back to El Campello (thirty minutes), finding a parking space near the old apartment (not likely), loading the car, driving 100 yards, unloading the car, then repeating the process except in reverse. Never mind the rental fee and fuel cost.

If you are a young single male you are thinking, “Dan, your logic was perfect. Your delivery was eloquent. Your argument, devastating!” If you are married you are thinking, “I wonder what kind of car they rented.”

It was a Skoda.

Maybe you’ve never heard of a Skoda. Nor had I. It is an adequately modern car with USB and Bluetooth connections so that you can sync your phone to the car’s stereo system. Denise asked that I make the connection while she drove. However, this is the dash display:

Looks suspiciously Russian, don’t you think? I told Denise if we let that Tsarist car get into our personal electronics we may later find that we unknowingly voted for Donald Trump. Is listening to Internet radio worth that kind of risk? I thought not.

I made up for the loss by singing what I could remember of every song I had ever heard. That mostly consisted of one line from the refrain of seven hits from the 70’s. It went something like this:

(In a deep bass voice) Let’s get it on
(In a falsetto voice) Ring my be-ell, ring my bell
(In my normal voice) You’re the one that I want, ooh, ooh, ooh
You’re so vain I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you, don’t you
Play that funky music white boy
You are the sunshine of my life
She was a long cool woman in a short dress
(In a deep bass voice) Let’s get it on (repeat on infinite loop)

Denise enjoyed my singing so much she said I should preserve my voice for future performances. She wanted me to still have a fine singing voice when we are in a nursing home. I said that we both might be deaf by then.

“I’m willing to risk it,” she said.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t told you about the actual rental process.

The man at the rental desk didn’t tell us that the car would be Russian. He acted like it would be a normal car. In fact, he seemed very much like an American car rental guy, reacting to our declining insurance like he was our dad and we just announced that we were dropping out of high school to pursue our dream of performing bassoon duets during dinner theater intermissions. We even declined to pay an extra ten euros for roadside assistance coverage. He put his head down and shook it from side to side, muttering in heavily accented English, “I hope you don’t regret this.”

I was torn. I didn’t want roadside assistance but I like to support local artists. This was a masterful performance. I applauded and shook his hand, saying “Bravo! Bravo!” He would have preferred getting the ten euros but he seemed glad to know that his genius had not gone unnoticed.

The parking spot closest to the old apartment was about 125 yards away. I was extremely happy that renting a car increased our walking distance by only 25 yards. I expressed my glee until Denise hit me with an umbrella.

Denise suggested we use the car to visit the town of Altea, and then go to the Algar Falls. Both are quite beautiful. You should look them up on the Internet. There you will find lots of pictures, all much better than any image I preserved. What interested me most, however, was the agriculture.

They grow loquat fruit trees there. The loquat is native to China. It is known as a Chinese plum, but it also is known as a Japanese plum. Calling a Chinese fruit a Japanese plum seems very non-PC to me. But that is not my point.

My point is that there are acres and acres, thousands of acres, of these trees. That is not surprising. What is surprising is that the loquat farmers have surrounded all these thousands of acres with netting. The netting covers the tops of the trees and extends to the ground. The purpose, we learned, is to foil birds who would otherwise feast on the fruit. Here is a picture of one small farm.

I could not get better pictures because Denise was driving the Putinmobile like a maniac and I needed both hands to prepare for an imminent crash. Trust me when I tell you that there were entire hillsides covered with top-to-bottom netting.

Here’s the thing about driving in Spain. They do not allow U-turns. It is absolutely forbidden. Therefore, if you miss a turn Google Maps will not say, “When possible, make a U-turn.” Much like an overly supportive parent, it will fail to acknowledge your error. It will allow you to keep driving in the wrong direction until you can reverse course through a series of right or left turns.

We learned this the hard way. We made a wrong turn and for over half an hour we followed a two lane road as it twisted and turned up and down rural hills. We did not have a real map so we had no idea that we were not going towards Altea. Finally we came to a small town and we were directed to turn onto a street and then make a series of turns until we ended up on the same two lane road, but going in the opposite direction, back towards El Campello.

I did not mind the detour. We saw a bit of Spain we might have otherwise missed and we had nothing better to do. But we experienced the same misdirections while driving busy city streets. Denise did a good job driving and I am sure she will say, when I am within earshot, that I was very patient with all the missed turns. But while I tried to hide my frustration by shouting at only 7/8 my capacity, I renewed my vow to never again drive a car, and to ride in one only when absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, it became absolutely necessary just two weeks later. That is a story that culminates in our sneaking past men carrying machine guns so that we could enter the American embassy in Madrid. Hand to God. Men toting assault weapons. American Embassy.

Stay tuned for the next installment of LetsMoseyOn.