Wednesday started early with a walk to the nearby rental-car office. Just blocks from where we were staying, it was supposed to be a quick-and-easy pickup - and Mom and Eryn were waiting in front of the hotel.
But then the lady told me that we hadn't returned the car we'd driven down from Minneapolis. Except we absolutely, 100% HAD returned the car. She couldn't give me another car until that was resolved, and she couldn't help me - I had to contact the Minneapolis Avis/Budget office.
When we picked up the first car, it was a total fiasco. The place was slammed, and after waiting in line for an hour, we finally went to our assigned stall and started loading the car. But then a woman walked up and said that was HER car. Both our paperwork listed the same car.
I told her to take it, and I went back inside to get it figured out. Another two people were inside - also having both been assigned to their same car. Umm.....
So they eventually gave me another car. But this car had been smoked in, and I didn't want to road trip in a stinky cigarette car. So I asked the manager, who happened to be right there, if I could get another car. No problem, he said....
It was definitely a problem. I think we were in and out of five more cars before we got one that we could actually have. (Though this car had not been cleaned since the previous rental and was full of literal garbage) My paperwork still listed the original car, but the manager said it would be straightened out at the gate when we left.
So I drove to the hotel, to the Twins game, and to Chicago the next day. We dropped off the car at Midway airport and went on with our vacation. (We had decided not to keep a car during our Chicago stay because of high rental fees, $75/day parking fees at our hotel, and availability of public transportation in the city)
I stood on the sidewalk with my luggage while Mom, at our nearby hotel, finally got ahold of someone in the Minneapolis office. They apparently had no record of the car we *actually* had rented, and they had already charged us an additional $900 in fees for not returning our rental - the car we never actually drove. The woman said they were looking at surveillance footage to try and figure out what car we had.
Fortunately, I had taken photos of our rental to show previous damage - and also in the Twins parking garage so we could find it after the game. One photo included the barcode! We sent those photos to Minneapolis, and after more than an hour, we finally had a new car.
Lesson learned: When you rent a car, always take a pic of the license plate and barcode!
ANYWAY... our schedule was already tight, so we didn't have time for much sightseeing on the way to Cincinnati. But we did have time for one stop:
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