Pbenjay's Blog

300 meters – we really don’t have a concept of how far that is BUT it is ridiculously far when you’ve already had the encounter with Andreas.  We are very slowly making our way down crumbling sidewalks on a fairly steep sloping street. You can’t see the garage although I pointed out a building in the distance that looked like it had the look of circular floors. And so on we trudged till finally we approached the mouth of the garage and who should we see but the young man who sat next to Andreas – he was the Avis agent.  He announced he was waiting for us to give us the keys to the car. He took us up the elevator, handed the keys to Peter, hopped on his motorcycle 🏍 and left.  OK then.

We put the bags in the car and started the descent to exit the garage. We had been given a ticket that had to be inserted into a device on the 4th or 3rd floor to lift a bar so you could continue to exit.  I thought a pit stop was in order before we left the garage, so we stopped where we saw a restroom sign, I think the first floor. Actually I had to take an elavatory down to the ground floor, Peter stayed with the car. I followed the sign only to see an out of order sign so I looked for the handicapped bathroom found it and can’t swear it was exactly in clean working order.

Not a soul was to be seen even though there was some sort of enclosed desk area. Next… Peter decides he should go before we go.  Minutes pass and more… He finally returns to tell me he couldn’t find the car and went all the way up,to the 5th floor!?!? Best to say nothing Lori.

We are about to head out but by now I’ve been sitting in a closed car and it is hot. Let’s put the air conditioning on. We try this and we try that and I look in the manual and nothing works. The temperature inside the car was 30C which means it was 84 degrees in the car.  That’s it, he’s taking the car back up to the 5th floor, he’s not driving 3 hours to Guardia with no a/c.  We thought we could just go back up but then we came up against that pesky barrier arm. Stupidly we decided to put that card in which of course was invalid AND of course another car came up behind us.  I jumped out of the car (as well as one can jump out of a car with a broken foot) and head up to the 5th floor on foot to get some help from the office.  Oh no there’s no one in the office 😲 What a shock!  Now the guy in the car behind Peter is out of his car and is directing Peter to back up into the other lane.  He was wearing a yellow jacket, I thought he was with Hertz or Avis. Uh no, he was just a guy trying to get the car in. So now we have to K-turn the car to go back down, defeated, hot and hangry.  Not sure of what to do about the air conditioning but we have to get out of this garage. As we get to the exit there is another barrier arm so we insert the ticket which is rejected because apparently we have overstayed our visit in the parking garage and it wants some money which of course we don’t have because it wants coins. However, anticipating this common predicament, instructions printed so small I had to get out of the car to read them in Italia.  I am  supposed to go out of the garage and enter through a doorway which brought my back to the empty office near the bathrooms out of order and there is a huge machine that looks like a combination ATM/soda machine and I put my debit card in and pay.

Get back in the car and let’s get the hell out of here…

To be continued….