Isn’t shopping for rental cars great fun? I don’t think so, either. I mean, there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from finally getting the deal nailed down on a car that’s the right size and hasn’t been driven by Islamic terrorists escorting Osama Bin Laden from Kabul, Afghanistan to a secret hideout in Tikrit, Iraq—although, I’ve had a couple of rental cars that I’m sure had done just that.

I’m talking about something simple. Fly to the Big Island. Pick up a rental car at the airport. Drive down the highway to a nice hotel. Stay there for a week. Drive back to the airport.

How hard is that?

In some third world countries that might be a major challenge. In Hawaii, it’s a major challenge.

I’m not equating Hawaii with a third world—although we’re about as far from the rest of the world as you can get. It’s just that, well, you know, the process of picking out a rental car and then getting to the rental car should be easy.

The first thing you do is leave it up to someone else.

“Honey, did you get the rental car taken care of yet?”

See. That works quite well. It worked well for us on our Big Island trip. She took care of the rental car arrangements. On this trip, it was Alamo. You know all about the Alamo, don’t you? I’m certain they rent cars that were produced when John Wayne and Fess Parker starred in the movie, The Alamo.

Anyway, we got a car reserved at a fair price. I hopped off the plane, picked up my luggage, and headed to the rental car shuttle bus area. The rental car shuttle bus is common at airports these days. One after another, about every ten minutes, like a convoy of HumVees heading down an Iraqi highway toward Baghdad, the rental car shuttle buses came rolling by.

Hertz. Dollar. Budget. National. Avis.

No Alamo bus.

Then Hertz again. Then Dollar again. Then Budget again. Then National and Avis.

No Alamo bus.

Then Hertz again. Then Dollar again. National, etc. You get the picture.

But no Alamo bus.

Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. There was another guy also looking for the Alamo bus. We saw a small sign on a stand across the street that said, “Alamo.” So we carted our luggage (wheels on suitcases are really worth more than icing on pop tarts—not by much, though) over to the lonely looking young woman at the Alamo rental car stand.

There wasn’t a customer in sight. Except us.

“Hello, I have a reservation for Alamo!” I said, expectantly.

“Catch the shuttle bus to the office”, she said.

I said, “There’s no Alamo shuttle bus.”

She said, “Yes there is. Take it to the rental car office.”

I said, “There’s no Alamo shuttle bus.”

She said, “Yes there is.”

In unison, the other customer and I said, “No, we waited 30-minutes and all the other buses came by three times. No Alamo shuttle bus.”

She said, “Oh, take the National bus. They’re the same.”

Sigh.

When the National shuttle bus came around 10 minutes later we asked him what happened to the Alamo shuttle bus. He said the driver took lunch already.

I really wanted to ask him how Alamo customers standing at the shuttle bus stop were supposed to know that the National shuttle bus was also going to take Alamo customers—but I didn’t.

Adventures like this don’t come along too often and I wanted it to be shared by someone else besides me.

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