NOVEMBER 02
And so we woke up in a slightly disappointing Best Western hotel on
the first official day of our holidays and found that the clocks appeared to be
lying to us.
After all, the Captain of the aircraft had specifically informed us
that we needed to adjust our clocks three hours back from Atlanta time, which
was itself four hours behind UK time, but had somehow neglected to mention that
this was also the night on which American clocks changed for daylight saving,
or whatever it is that they choose to call it, a confusion that was added to by
the clocks in the lobby remaining unadjusted when we trudged down for
breakfast.
The disappointment with the hotel – and perhaps, at that point, the
whole ruddy country – was compounded by being told that our breakfast was not included in the room rate, and that
it would be charged to the room which meant that the coffee and orange juice
that we were planning on grabbing now had to include a whole host of other
things if we were to feel, even slightly, as if we were going to get our
money’s worth.
Although, given that ordinary American White Bread is almost
unbearably sweet, and the whole “buffet bar” experience of getting a
“Continental Breakfast” in and around the New Zealand Cycling Team, I suspect
if we were still eating now we might not yet have got our “Money’s Worth…”
Still…
All of the (admittedly minor)
disappointments we experienced at the hotel were more than made up for by the
existence of their complimentary Airport Shuttle service which, because of that
tricky little extra hour, deposited us back at the terminals only forty minutes
too early to collect our hire car.
Still, we rolled our cases onto the monorail and headed over to the
Car Rental building and only had minor problems in being given the car when the
Operative decided that my old-fashioned pink paper Driving Licence – which I
had been assured would still be perfectly acceptable alongside my passport – was
not a valid enough document for him to honour our rental agreement.
With dark and worrying
mutterings about “International Driving Licences” he vanished and, for a
moment, it looked as if all of our holiday plans lay in the balance…
Happily, an unseen “colleague” seemed to disagree with him and,
shortly afterwards, papers and “GPS System” in hand we headed off in search of
the garage and selected for ourselves (from the “Compact” zone), a Black Ford
Fiesta which we dubbed – in due deference to its licence plate – “Beattie”.
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