I took a direct Porter flight from Hamilton, which made things simple. I had prebooked a small AWD SUV from the Vancouver airport Enterprise, but when I got there, they didn’t have my car.
“We can give you an alternate,” said the rep, walking me through the vehicles they had on hand.
“The key is all wheel drive,” I said. “I’m driving on those curvy Sea-to-Sky roads.”
“We’ve got two AWD vehicles available right now,” he said, showing me a Jeep Cherokee and a humungous Mercedes SUV.
I didn’t want to drive a Jeep on curvy roads, but the Mercedes, hmm. “You’ll honour the price on the contract? For a small SUV?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take the Mercedes.”
“Good choice.” He handed me the keys, put my luggage in the trunk, and left.
I got in the car and tried to figure out the controls. Weirdly, everything was on the wand that on my car is for the windshield wiper. It took me forever to find Park. This was going to be a learning curve. I also had to attach my phone mount so I could use my cell phone as a GPS, and then plug in where I was going.
The rep tapped on my window. “Can you move the car? People behind you can’t get out.”
I still hadn’t located Drive!
I managed to move the car and get it back into park, and keyed in my location, then drove out of the airport and into heavy Vancouver traffic, still trying to get used to the controls. Scary!
I met up with my longtime friend Paulette MacQuarrie, host of Nash Holos, Ukrainian Roots Radio. She had taken the ferry in to meet me for lunch.
We headed over to Kozak Eatery in Gastown, a fabulous Ukrainian restaurant, and feasted on borshch and rye bread, with syrniki for dessert. It was so great to see Paulette in person. We chat often by zoom and phone but hadn’t seen each other in over a decade.
