Mini Mini-Van

Hello,

Renting a car in another country is always a strange experience.  As hard as it is in some countries to get a license or pass through their barrage of required lessons, pay a bunch of money or attach giant letters to your trunk for some number of years telling everyone to stay away from this guy, all you really need is $20 a day and a license from some other country.  Because obviously all the other countries are equally as strict right?

20 minutes after landing in Madrid, my 26th straight hour of being awake, I was settling in to my Opel mini mini-van because 17 years ago in Las Vegas I was deemed a driver that was good enough.  After the usual finding the mirrors button and plugging in the phone GPS I was ready to go.  Two issues with this seemingly perfect start:

The first was the stick shift had one of those buttons to get it into reverse which would protect you from accidentally placing the car in reverse.  On this car the reverse gear was before first gear.  My stick shift that I drive at home does not have one of these modern and likely very common buttons so not wanting to put the car in reverse, I mistakenly put the car firmly in 3rd gear.  This requires a surprising large amount of rpms to not stall out.  The kind that people look over to see what is going on.  Probably should have been a signal that something wasn't quite right with my method but again, this was hour 26.

The second issue is that thanks to T-mobile, all international data is now free in most countries leading me to confidently tell the person at the Enterprise Madrid rental car stand, "No, I won't be needing a GPS."  My phone had some different thoughts about this.  I thought by the time my little race car sounding mini mini-van got out of the parking lot, it would all be ready to go.  Instead it was telling me I was somewhere in a 15 mile radius of the Madrid airport.  This isn't ideal given the number of freeways converging on the airport.  This led me to try to wing it to get out on the right highway.

"Winging it" includes: trying to get the car from not stalling in my decidedly bad gear placement, turning on my windshield wipers to announce my upcoming turns, leaving an airport parking lot that I've never been to while dodging wandering airport people and their luggage (basically me 5 minutes prior which I can confidently say they have no idea where they are going), and trying to use as many context clues as possible to decide what is legal combined with a very real fear of being the first car in line at stoplights, roundabouts or anywhere really.

Leaving the airport consisted of a series of three roundabouts which on all three occasions I would get up to yield to cars, start off with my high rev rpms, stall the moment I got into the circle and then drift off in a straight line with my engine off until getting the car back on and into gear to make my turn.  It looked kind of like what I would imagine the moon would do if it decided it was no longer happy going around the earth.

There must be an easier way to get from the airport to the highway that I needed but my bumbling method proved effective and 10 minutes later I was on the right road out of Madrid.  About 5 minutes after that my phone locked on to GPS confirming I was in fact going in the right direction.  At about 9pm (or in Spain, dinner time if you were a small child and had to go to bed early) I arrived at my hotel in Olite.  Thankfully not many people were out for dinner because per the hotel sign, I was instructed to go down a street the width of a mini mini-van where I would find parking for my hotel, as indicated by the blue P next to the hotel name.  Sounds easy enough.

I happen to be good at Excel style math - numbers, relational formulas and things.  What I am incredibly not good at is geometry.  When you have a geometry problem that consists of a street that is as wide as your car, the entrance to the parking garage is as wide as your car at a 90 degree turn, the scraped walls from the previous peoples attempts of getting into the parking entrance looking right at you, and both the front beeper sensor and the back beeper sensor are yelling at you at the same time (surprisingly with two different tones), I have a hard time solving this equation especially with this problem given to me on my 30th awake hour.  Thankfully by this point I had already discovered 1st gear earlier at a truck stop and my beeper filled 12 point turn set me at the perfect angle to go down the parking ramp.

The next morning however, my quick glance at the medieval city map telling myself to drive down this road, take a quick right on this street and a left on this one to get out of town nice and easy, was not the wisest plan.  About 3 minutes into driving I realized no streets are labeled, the map was a suggested artistic resemblance and not drawn to scale, and allowing cars on most of these streets must be Olite's version of my quickly checking Youtube every time it snows in Portland (those crazy fools crack me up).

Thanks to some gracious soul in Olite that carved out a hole in the stone wall at the perfect height of a mini mini van mirror, I was able to make the final turn (lets call it a 15 point turn as long as we can round down) out of the city.  The rest of the trip of driving around Spain was mostly uneventful minus the confusing Murcia massive roundabouts which somehow had both stoplights and yields.  I am sure I did not handle these correctly.

Looking forward to the next country!

your friend,
chad