Product Endorsement

Ok, just to vent a bit. Revathi and I had a car in Heidelberg. A very small car called a Panda. I got the Hertz Never Lost system with the car. Hertz needs to consider rebranding this to Hertz Always Lost or at least be a bit explicit that the system might have just a few bugs. I will grant that odd 1000 year old European cities could cause just about any system some difficulties but when the darn thing would tell us to turn left and we did, it would promptly announce that it was "recalculating". We were screaming at the thing last night "WE DID!" I think we offended it, so today it got even. We had to drive from Heidelberg to Frankfurt Hahn airport. In spite of the name, Frankfurt Hahn is really nowhere near Frankfurt. It would be like renaming the Denver International Airport something like Chicago DIA. Oh, you might think it's close, but it's not.

On the way, the system announced on the autobahn that we were to take the next exit--as in, the one that we were currently zipping past at 120 kmh. Thanks Hertz! Then it decided to recalculate. Apparently, it waited to tell us about the exit we were flying past when there was no way to take any corrective action for about 25 miles. Nice. So we were re-routed through Worms. Despite the seriously unfortunate name in English, Worms was a pretty interesting place to drive into. And back out of. And back into. Thanks Hertz! It was great the way you said turn left and then routed us back across the bridge only to turn around and enter the city again. On the upside, we did get to take another shot of the bridge.

Frankfurt Hahn was a very strange airport and Ryan Air was a definite loser of an airline. We dropped the car and then had to walk to the terminal. No shuttle. In the rain. Uphill. The surrealness of it did add to the general strangeness of the day. We got in and discovered a massive crush of people (apparentally all their flights leave at the same time) and after waiting a surreal amount of time in line, we discovered that they have a maximum luggage weight of 15 kg (33lbs). Ouch. And of course, since we were flying internationally and for work, we had tons of extra stuff with us (I have 2 computers with me, for example). I thought fine, we'll pay for the extra weight, there's nothing we can do. And discovered that the extra weight was charged at an outlandish 15 Eur per kg! My extra 5 kg thus rang up for another 75 Eur!

And to make matters worse, you can't pay the additional baggage fee at the counter, you have to leave the line and go to the ticket counter, pay there and then go back through the crush of people to get your boarding pass. After all that, we had to go through security, which like other odd regional airports, was insanely slow.

But after all that, we've made it to Valencia. We're in Spain until Sunday (Valencia, then Palma de Mallorca) when we fly to Manchester and parts north...