I
wonder how old the rental car business is? I know as a child, receiving the
National Geographic in our home, I regularly saw advertisements for Hertz and
Avis, featuring the glamour of the chromed-up full-sized sedans of North
America of the time, the 50s and 60s. Now, of course, if you're willing to pay
the price at the top end, you can rent everything from the smallest economy box
to luxury and high-speed performance cars. Car rental has become big business.
When
I decided to make my first foray into renting cars, I actually did it in a big
way, which I have never replicated since. It really wasn't with any great
intent that this happened though. It came about in this way. I lived just south
of Portage Avenue in Winnipeg and there were car dealers and car rental agents
along that thoroughfare not far from my abode. One in particular, I believe it
was a name from that time, Airways, was offering cars at $19 a day; this was in
1968. That seemed like a pretty good deal.
My
friend from Canadian Mennonite Bible College days, Bernie Thiessen, whom my
relationship with had grown stronger by my working in his home community of
Rosemary Alberta a couple of summers earlier, then moving in with him and
another ex-CMBC’er Bruno Klassen, was getting married. Since Bernie's
wife-to-be Kathy Sawatzky came from MacGregor and we were living in Winnipeg,
it was decided to have their wedding in Portage la Prairie, in between. Bruno had a car but Bernie did not. That
called for some extra transportation, which was where the rental car was going
to come in handy. Taking things and people out there on Friday and bringing
them back on Saturday after the wedding and reception was going to require some
space. I also thought it would be useful to be able to go and visit my
grandparents and other relatives in Winkler one last time on the Sunday, as I
was moving to Saskatoon the following week.
I
rented a brand-new Plymouth Barracuda fastback, a red one. It was probably a 340 cubic inch V8, with automatic transmission on the floor. It did indeed come in
handy on Saturday night, as there were some large wedding gifts that needed to
be transported back to Winnipeg. I think I remember items such as floor mops or
something like that.
Then,
Sunday afternoon I headed out to Winkler. Being a young, red-blooded Canadian,
I thought I needed to test this sporty car out on the straightaway of Number 23
Highway once I got away from Morris. I was nearing Lowe Farm when something blew.
It was the water heater hose. Perhaps 105 miles an hour was creating too much
pressure! I remembered that a friend of my father's, a Mr. Braun, who had come
to help us build our house in Loon Straits a decade earlier, owned a garage in the town. I
limped into town and located him and he was kind enough to patch things up and
get me on my way - at a more sedate speed thereafter.
I
was only taking black and white pictures at that time, as color prints were not
yet very reliable, and I had not yet graduated to slides or transparencies.
Therefore, I have one such photo of the car in the middle of my grandfather's
driveway area.
I am
not sure, but I think my next experience with a rental car was driving a 1970
Ford Galaxy sedan from Winnipeg to Elkhart, Indiana and back in the winter of
1970. I had traveled from Saskatoon to Winnipeg to join my brother Les, his friend
Kathy Bergen and others from CMBC and the Winnipeg area as we motored to an open house at Associated Mennonite
Biblical Seminaries. I remember how impressed I was by my first experience
driving on the broad, multilane toll-road through Chicago. After a while, one
developed the art of slowing down, with the window down just enough to throw
the required change into the big bins at the tollgates and rev the motor up
again to race back onto the next stretch of highway. On the return trip,
driving in the middle of the night, wanting to get home to Winnipeg sooner
rather than later, I remember getting stopped by state troopers. We were lucky
to get off with a warning. Another car that we were traveling with had to
backtrack to a local town and pay the fine right then.
I
thought I had finished this essay when I realized there were 2 other car rental
experiences that I needed to insert right here. Interestingly, I had just come
to this point in the article on my proofreading it.
When
our firstborn, Ansel, was not yet 3, my employer managed to get a much-needed
locum to replace me while the 3 of us went on a vacation. The young couple
coming over from the UK stayed in our home while we took a spring vacation to
Eastern Canada. It was really still winter in 1982. We landed in Toronto and
picked up our rental car for this trip, a gray Plymouth Reliant or K-Car as
they were known. with a dark red interior. We visited Fort York and the Black
Creek Pioneer Village. We also explored Mennonite and Amish country around
towns like St. Jacob's and Elmira. We had a nice ethnic Sunday noon Mennonite
lunch, fried potatoes, apple betty and all, in a converted old farm storage
building which, as I recall, was part of a somewhat boutique complex. Then we
traveled east to Montréal but even more so to Québec city, which we had never
explored before. For our lodgings we got a nice place in an older hotel, called I believe the Château Laurier, across
the street from the Québec National Assembly. That gave us a nice center from
which to explore the old city and Place Royale down at the river level. One day
we even went farther east to Sainte Anne's and the large church/ healing shrine there and nearby Montmorency Falls, including
a driving circuit of Isle de Orleans. Our Readers' Digest/CAA guidebook
describe the different forms of architecture indicating the ages of the homes
we saw by their roof, chimney and window/dormer structure. It was notable that
there were 4 old Catholic churches on the island dating from the 18th century.
Then,
the following summer, 1983, Anne's cousins Harry and Grace came to stay with us
to attend high school in Canada. Anne's father accompanied them and their
mother to help bring them over and get them settled. We began their stay with a
trip to Eastern Canada, ergo, another rental car. Since there were 7 of us, we
had no choice but to rent a larger vehicle, which turned out to be one of those
faux-wood-sided Chevrolet Impala wagons, with 2 little seats in the rear, red
plush velour like the rest of the interior, facing each other, where the
youngest 3 mostly sat. We had driven to Winnipeg, from where our flight to
Eastern Canada left, in our new 1983 two-door GMC Jimmy, so we were somewhat
crowded, not to mention that it was hot and that the vehicle still did not have
air-conditioning. Just the same, it was otherwise a nice vehicle and the only
one I ever factory-ordered.
Again,
we started in Toronto, visiting Niagara falls, then motoring up to Ottawa,
including a tour of the Parliament buildings to the top of the Peace Tower.
Then we went on to Montréal, before returning to Toronto and home. Because of some dissension in our group about the costs of motels, we ended up staying in a few places that were
less than what I would've liked to make my father-in-law comfortable in.
It
was a few years after that before I rented another car. Life got busy and we just did not do that kind of traveling.
However, in 1986, I decided to take our son Ansel, then 7, to visit his
grandparents and also to attend Expo 86 in Vancouver. We stayed at family
friends from our Winnipeg days, the Died Reimers, in Surrey, and took advantage
of the brand-new Expo line skytrain to commute from that suburb to the site of
the exposition. However, in the middle of the week, to expedite the visit to
Vernon, I found a car at what was then known as Rent-a-Wreck. I was trying to
save money. I got a dark blue 1984 Mustang coupe, which I thought might be fun.
However, for its size and weight, especially going through the mountains, the
new four-lane toll Coquihalla Highway of all things, it was probably one of the
most gutless cars I've driven; it only had a 4 cylinders. I guess it's an
example of you get what you pay for.
It
may not have then been until 1988 when we went to Disneyland in Florida, with
our children then age 4 and 9, that we rented again, first a red 4-door Suzuki sedan and
then a grey 4-door Nissan Sentra. We only rented each of these cars for a day
or 2 at a time, as we did not need cars for the duration of our trip. These
were obviously both small economy cars but the Suzuki got us down the Pacific
coast to San Juan Capistrano, a destination I had heard about since my
childhood days. It is the place where the swallows return on March 19 every
year.
Besides
my interest in cars, which should now be evident, I am also something of a
birdwatcher. Some might find those 2 pursuits incongruously incompatible, but
they both have to do with beauty, one man-made and one natural. Either way, I
attribute the source of beauty and creativity to the same Creator, even though
expressed via different means.
I
think the swallows had already arrived for the year when we were at the mission.
We had stopped en route to check out the ocean and also to have lunch at one of
those nice 50's style diner cafés with the black and white tiled floors etc.
Both cars managed, somewhat surprisingly, to get us through whatever parts of
freeway we had to traverse around Los Angeles without any trouble though, in
spite of their size and power, or lack thereof.
It
was only 2 years before we rented again. In 1990, my Department Head, Dr. Gary
Sloan, at Brandon Mental Health Center, offered a week at a resort in Florida
for the unbelievable sum of $105. Since there was a lot of snow and the
temperature was hitting -30°C, I thought it would be good to give our
father-in-law, Anne's father, a break. We took Dr. Sloan up on the offer and
soon our family of 4 plus both of Anne's parents were in Orlando, Florida. We
found our way from the arrivals terminal to where a van picked us up to take us
to the car rental agency. It was after 9 PM, already dark. I remember the
warmth and the humidity compared to what we had left behind. However, as we
headed out farther and farther into the night on the highway, I began to wonder
apprehensively where this van was taking us. Where we being kidnapped? Then we began
to see the huge acreages of car rentals along the highway and realized what
people meant when they said that Orlando was one of the major tourist
destinations. It was late, but once regard our car, we still needed dinner, so
when we arrived back in Kissimmee, near our destination, we stopped at Perkins
for our first meal in Florida. Perkins was a new chain for us at the time,
although it was soon to open in Brandon as well. The car we were driving was a
blue 1990 Chevrolet Lumina, a brand-new model, with a V6 that was large enough
to get us around. The farthest we went was to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy
Space Center.
I
think my next car rentals took place when our son Ansel was at UBC. Once Anne, Anika
and I went to visit him and I believe the car we had on that occasion was a
dark green Ford Taurus wagon. Anika did not remember having been in Vancouver
before, perhaps had never been, and so was somewhat nonplussed when our first
stop after the airport was on the mountain at Queen Elizabeth Park and a man stepped
out of a service van near us in the parking lot without being too shy to
relieve himself in full view, albeit with his back to us. That was her welcome
to Vancouver.
On
another trip to visit Ansel, which I may have made on my own, my vehicle was a
late 1990's model Toyota Corolla. I think we rented another one on another
occasion when I also came with Anne and Anika. Then, in 2004, when I stopped in
Vancouver en route to join Anne in Taiwan for a visit with her family, I rented
a red two-door Toyota Echo. It was March, and there was still snow on the
Coquihalla Highway, the car took me all the way to visit my parents in Vernon
and back with no trouble. These last 3 or 4 rentals were all made from the Budget
Car Rental at the corner of Pender and Abbott, an agency which no longer exists
on that location near our Beatty apartment.
Our
next series of car rentals was in Montréal, visiting our children when they
were attending McGill University. I think this may have been when I first got a
free upgrade to a larger car than what I had reserved. What we got was a full-sized
Chevrolet Impala, light tan in color, to stay at a resort near Mont Tremblant,
while we skied there. Later in our week, while we were having lunch above a food
court in a shopping center in downtown Montréal, my bag with my camera got
stolen, so we were lacking in pictures from that trip, including of that car.
A
car I wanted to try at the time, because the manufacturer tried to pass it off as somewhat of a sporty vehicle, was the Pontiac Grand Prix of the day. We
managed to get a dark brown model on a subsequent trip, which took us to
another ski resort timeshare in the Laurentians. I think that was the time I
ended up paying more than I needed to because I forgot to redeem my Airmiles
car-rental certificate when I picked up the car! Then, the year Ansel graduated,
2004, and we had reserved a timeshare at Lake Magog, we got another free
upgrade. This time it was to a sporty-looking and powerful enough red Chevrolet
Monte Carlo Coupe, in 2004. That one took us back and forth to Montréal several
times. When Anne and I had been in this area the previous fall on a visit, we
had toured the same countryside in another full-sized Chevrolet Impala. We had
enjoyed the colors at the time, of course, the typical Eastern autumn, but it
made us want to come back and see the same area in spring, when there would be
more birds around. Remember, I am also a bird watcher.
During
the years from 1989-2005, when I was working for the Brandon Regional Health
Authority and doing rural psychiatric consultations, I had car rental
experiences of a somewhat different nature. I was able to rent vehicles for those trips. The
organization's “bean counters” thought it was cheaper to do that than buy
vehicles, which I did not mind. When I had been working under the Government of
Manitoba at the Brandon Mental Health Center just prior to that, really the
same job, the agency had owned vehicles - lackluster Chevrolet Cavaliers. For
the most part, the rentals I was now driving included Chevrolet Malibus,
Impalas and even the upscale Oldsmobile Intrigue, which was a fine car to sail
along through the country with. The Malibus of those years were quite all right
too. I would use these to go to Rivers/Minnedosa/Neepawa, Dauphin, Shoal
Lake/Myrtle/Russell and Souris/Virden, as well as Wawanesa/Boissevain/Killarney.
Of course, I was not paying for these cars personally. I always picked them up
at the local Murray Chev-Olds-Cadillac dealership, so they got to know me well.
In
1998, we returned to Orlando to spend Christmas week in our timeshare there.
Perhaps that was the time we had the Ford Taurus wagon, perhaps we had one
twice. This time we drove up to Silver Springs one day for a nature safari and
on another day northwest to the coast and St. Augustine, stopping at Daytona
Beach along the way.
In
2005, we move from Manitoba to British Columbia. Our trusty 2005 Dodge Stratus
broke down between Brooks and Rosemary Alberta on a hot Saturday afternoon.
Fortunately, my cousin Heidi and her family lived a half hour drive away and
came to pick us up, while the car was towed to the garage in Brooks for repair.
We had to take possession of our condominium in Richmond on the following
Wednesday. When it was evident by Monday that the car was not going to be
repaired in time to get us there, we rented a Pontiac Montana minivan from a
small family agency in Gem, east of Rosemary. We picked the car up right off
their rural acreage. Anne, Anika and I took this to Richmond with everything
that was in our car. We left Anika at the apartment and returned to Brooks. The
car still was not repaired. It wasn't until we spoke to the manager and he
intervened that we were able to get on the road Friday and begin our journey
back to Richmond, arriving by Saturday night.
I had never rented a minivan
otherwise, but when our Child and Adolescent Treatment Center in Brandon was
able to eventually lease a Chevrolet Venture minivan, I sometimes used that on
my rural trips. On one occasion, when the temperature was harboring around -30,
I inadvertently backed into a protective steel pylon at the Virden Hospital and
quite nicely damaged the vinyl rear bumper at that temperature. Fortunately, I
did not have to pay for that $1500 touch.
In
2006 then, Anne and I returned to Manitoba for a visit. We rented from National
and got another one of those free upgrades. Instead of motoring out to Brandon
to visit our former friends and neighbors in some little econobox, we got a
silver Nissan Maxima with all the extras. I must say I was not overly impressed
with its dashboard layout though. On a couple of my other trips to Manitoba,
which I subsequently made alone, as Anne does not appreciate my style of ad hoc
traveling and visiting, I had cars such as Hyundai Elantras. Then, as if to make up for
that, when I went to take the Canadian School of Peace Building course at
Canadian Mennonite University in June 2011, I got a real upgrade. Instead of
some compact, I was given a bright orange brand-new Dodge Charger for my first
weekend there. I could hardly contain
my glee when I calmly answered in the affirmative when the agent asked if this
would do. That was fun cruising down Portage Avenue with on Sunday afternoon, especially when my
identical twin car showed up in the lane next to me. It reminded me of the good
experience I had with the Mopar brand in my very first foray into car rentals. Those were definitely highlights of my car rental experiences. I rented
a car again the following weekend, but that was only, I believe, a n older Pontiac G5.
It was from some new car rental agency on McPhillips Street, far from the
airport, that I had never heard about before but got through a cheap deal on a
website.
In
the fall of 2012, which was when I made my Manitoba visit that year, en route
back to Richmond from a conference and visiting our son in Montréal and friends
in the Toronto area, I again rented a car. I wanted to go to Brandon to visit
friends and my nephew and his wife and see their new son. Guess what? Another
free upgrade! I got to drive a full-size Nissan Altima, which was a car I would
not have minded buying when we ended up getting a Honda Accord in 2005. After
spending the night at friends' after a late arrival and less than the full day Sunday in Brandon, I picked up my brother Les in Winnipeg and
we went out to visit our cousin Patti (Braun) and Doug Enns’ B & B at
Whitemouth near the Whiteshell Provincial Park area. There had just been one of
those early season snowstorms - this was the first half of October - and there
was still a lot of snow around. So much for our hopes of canoeing on their private lake there. Turns out Les remembered babysitting Doug when
we were neighbors in North Kildonan in Winnipeg decades before.
The next day we
went back to Winnipeg and then I also went out subsequently to visit my aunt
and uncle Anne and Marvin Enns, mother's youngest and only remaining brother in
Winkler, which I've always done on my visits back to Manitoba. He's my closest
remaining link to the Enns farm in Burwalde, which has almost sacred memories
for me. It is a place, where my mother grew up, and where I also spent many
happy hours as a child and young man with my siblings and cousins.
We
had another interesting experience with our last, as in most recent, car
rental. We had arrived once again in Orlando to spend a week in a timeshare.
However, this time we actually had people in the area to visit. The main reason
for going there was to visit my niece Lisa, Les's daughter, her husband Javier
and their twins Sofia and Cesc, whom we had not seen. We were all four from our
family together again, Ansel having come to join us from Montréal, thanks to
our Airmiles. The car rental agency, Advantage, offered us a Fiat 500! As if we
could have all fit in there let alone our luggage. I would have loved it if it
had just been myself. However, practicality prevailed and we were able to
arrange a reasonable upgrade to the Kia Fortis, which was the first time I
drove something in that line. It was a dark brown four-door sedan. It was
surprisingly peppy cruising up and down the Florida highways, even though you
noticed the kind of car it was when you slammed the back doors - a little tinny
sounding. However, it took us to the coast again, although this time we went to
a wildlife refuge instead of a space center. It also took us to Legoland, not
to mention several visits with my niece and her entertaining twins.
I
have probably missed some rental cars, which obviously were not standouts. I
don't think I have pictures of all of them either. However, I obviously
remember the ones that stand out and which were most unique or enjoyable. Of course, I will remember some because of the trips they were part of. With
getting as many free upgrades as I have, to some interesting cars, renting a
car has become somewhat of an interesting game of chance as to what one will
actually get, in spite of my usually reserving something on the smaller end of
the scale, just to get me from A to B and fit my overall lifestyle aims of
keeping things on the simple side. More so, in recent years, also becoming more
aware of the environment, global warming and the carbon impact, we have tried
to use public transportation and walk instead of always going for the car
rental. However, I have been fortunate enough to afford some of these vacations
where we did have the freedom and mobility of the automobile to explore farther
afield than would have been possible otherwise.
After
I had finished this article I realized I should include another aspect of this
story I had not covered. Besides enjoying the trips these autos took me/us on,
there are two things I could add. The first is that in spite of all the miles put
on with rental cars, we have never had an accident. The 2nd is that we have
never really run into trouble with a rental agency for overcharging or trying
to extract money afterwards for things that they say they found wrong with the
car later, as we have heard stories about some people experiencing. So, in that
regard, all I can say is, thank you God!
Happy
vacationing to you too!
Next, Learning to Drive...
