Off Again

It seems that it is our destiny to push to the limit the willing suspension of disbelief the comedy of errors involved in traveling long distances, especially when it involves a rental car.  All started well.  I even took Everett out for a walk while the others finished packing.  We looked out over the Ouse one last time.  The plan was for Nancy and me to take our backpacks and one suitcase each to the Avis, since moving the car to any parking lot would not gain us much in closeness to the apartment and only aggravate us in terms of actually finding such a parking space.   We would check in and then go back and get everything and everyone else.  The picture of the boys here shows us at that stage in our plan.  But when we arrived the car was parked too close to the building to start packing and the young man checking us in encountered every imaginable computer roadblock.  It was 9:00 when we arrived and after 10:00 before we left.  Did I tell you that I had struck a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" deal with the Avis employee who check me out on Saturday because Avis would have to incur the expense locating and transporting a different car so that we could leave at 9:00.  We took the same "upgraded" expletive car that we came in for the same price as my original reservation with no extra charge for taking it early.  Note that we really didn't need to be at the airport until about 7:00, but our experience on Friday made us all too nervous to do anything but play it extremely safe.  So far we had no reason to discount our fears.  The GPS took us out of York a different way than we had come it, but we passed through some beautiful countryside and I had made only one bad turn early on, misunderstanding what the GPS was telling me to do.  Oh, yes, another young man went to great lengths to figure how the voice on the GPS worked for us.  We never got to use it on the way to York.   The next phase of the trip did, however, defy our fears.  I'll relay more in the next few posts.