Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I’ve heard that you should try to experience everything at least once. It’s a pretty good idea, but recently I’ve been experiencing way too new bad travel experiences.

Recently, I’ve had the “get stuck on the tarmac at JFK for a few hours” and the “have a multi-stopover European flight get completely re-routed due to weather.”

This week I had “your rental car gets vandalized”. My rental car for my business trip to the Bay Area was a Chrysler 300. It’s a nice looking, fancy car that’s generally not driven by mild mannered Indian guys. When I picked it up, I thought, “Cool, but it will attract the wrong attention. On the plus side, if I feel the need to deal drugs I’ve got the wheels.”

My flight out was Friday morning, so I stayed over at Jamie’s place Thursday night for a great intersection of good outcomes: got to hang out with Jamie and got to sleep a bit more because Jamie lives so close to the airport.

So Friday morning, I walk out to the car to discover that someone had taken a really good swing with a baseball bat into the middle of my car’s windshield. They didn’t smash through (weaklings!), but the damage made it impossible to see out of the windshield and there were glass shards in the driver’s seat.

So I called Hertz and explained what happened. They called me a cab to take me to the airport and had me lock the keys in the glove compartment. I went to airport Hertz and filled out an incident report. Since I had LDW (loss damage waiver), it was all taken care of.

Overall, the experience was pretty straight forward and easy. I was impressed, either this sort of thing happens all the time or they have good training.

This little incident delayed my arrival to the airport. I arrived at security 20 minutes before takeoff, but still managed to make my flight. I didn’t however got to get my customary leaving San Jose Airport Togos sandwich. This meant I didn’t get breakfast or lunch so far in the day. I did get a snack box on the plane so I got to have some cheese product and crackers, sunflower butter (weird and good) with more crackers, apricots, and a cookie.

Let’s hope that all I’ve gotten all this travel drama out of my system; a smooth Christmas travel season would be much appreciated. :-)