{"id":733,"date":"2010-09-20T22:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T22:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=733"},"modified":"2016-07-02T13:23:20","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T13:23:20","slug":"ive-had-a-whale-of-a-time-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=733","title":{"rendered":"Monday 20th September 2010 &#8211; I&#8217;ve had a whale of a time today ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve spent all afternoon trying to book a flight and a car hire. I&#8217;ve narrowed my options down to<br \/>1) a flight to either Toronto in Canada or Detroit in the USA<br \/>2) either the cheapest and smallest car possible, or else a small motorhome.<\/p>\n<p>Now how difficult is that for any travel agent to come up with?<\/p>\n<p>First port of call was Lastminute dot com. Their price for a flight as an unbelievable \u00a31408. Now I can get a deal myself for \u20ac650 off the internet so that&#8217;s a non-starter. <\/p>\n<p>But what was even more unbelievable was that they couldn&#8217;t offer me car hire. Apparently, that company is now owned by a car hire firm and they don&#8217;t do car hire in Canada in winter.<br \/>&#8220;Do you do it in the USA in winter?&#8221; I said, after recovering from the shock.<br \/>&#8220;Ohh yes&#8221; said the boy on the phone.<br \/>&#8220;So can you work out a deal for me from Detroit then?&#8221;<br \/>So he gave me some figures, which on the face of it were quite reasonable.<br \/>&#8220;And that&#8217;s unlimited mileage?&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;No &#8211; 1000 miles&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;Per week?&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;No, per Hire&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Keen readers of my pages will know that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.erichall.eu\/2002u070.html\">I am capable of doing 1000 miles in a weekend in North America<\/a>, never mind 6 weeks. Ahh well, that&#8217;s another speedo cable I&#8217;ll have to pull out, I suppose.<br \/>&#8220;And you can&#8217;t take it to Canada either&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;What?&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;Our hire company doesn&#8217;t allow its cars to go abroad&#8221;<br \/>Well&#8217; as Burt Reynolds once said, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?link_code=ur2&#038;tag=erichall-21&#038;camp=1634&#038;creative=6738&#038;path=external-search%3Fsearch-type=ss%26index=blended%26keyword=smokey%20and%20the%20bandit\" target=\"_blank\">you&#8217;ve got to catch me first<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.co.uk\/e\/ir?t=erichall-21&#038;l=ur2&#038;o=2\" width=\"1\">&#8220;. I&#8217;ve heard some stupid things in my time, I&#8217;ll tell you.<\/p>\n<p>And you have to pay the first $7,000 of any damage too. If you want insurance against that so that you only pay the first \u20ac500, that&#8217;s an extra \u00a320 per day&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Well, they can p155 off.and no mistake.<\/p>\n<p>And any other internet company? They can do the vehicle hire. Or they can do the air fare. But can they do both? Ohhhhh no. It&#8217;s far too difficult.<\/p>\n<p>The only answer is to go to the travel agent who organised me t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.erichall.eu\/2003c010.html\">he last time I went to Canada<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.erichall.eu\/2005u010.html\">the last time I went to the USA<\/a>. The only problem is that they are in Brussels and all their flights go out of Zaventem. So unless anyone reading this blog has any better ideas (and I hope someone does) then \u00a0on Friday morning when I&#8217;m in Brussels I&#8217;ll be booking my flight and my car, attending to my business, coming back to here, recording our radio programme, sleeping overnight in Riom, caching the 05:40 train to Paris and then the 10:40 TGV back to Brussels, where I&#8217;ll get the airport shuttle.<\/p>\n<p>But one good thing that will come out of it is that I&#8217;ll be so exhausted by all of this that once I&#8217;m on the aeroplane I&#8217;ll crash out all the way to North America. Which, seeing as I am something of a nervous traveller on aeroplanes, isn&#8217;t such a bad idea. But seriously, here I am trying to arrange for myself a less-stressful life and all of the events are conspiring against me.<\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-733 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='733' data-nonce='7faa308a29' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-733 lc'>+2<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-733 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='733' data-nonce='7faa308a29' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-733 unlc'>-3<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-733 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>\n    <p style=\"background-color: #f7e7b7; padding: 8px; margin-top: 1em; font-size: 0.95em;\">\n        IMPORTANT NOTE: From 1 September 2026 this blog has a live blog feature for the latest news.\n        Click any post title with \"LIVE\" in it to see live updates. Comments are welcome from logged-in users and must be approved before they appear.\n    <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve spent all afternoon trying to book a flight and a car hire. I&#8217;ve narrowed my options down to1) a flight to either Toronto in Canada or Detroit in the USA2) either the cheapest and smallest car possible, or else a small motorhome. Now how difficult is that for any travel agent to come up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4507,1616,258],"tags":[199,5881,7404,1624,4893,1627,324,2560,5565,801,206,5366,1311,5411,5486,5964,1581,6849],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-les-guis","tag-brussels-2","tag-brussels-national-airport","tag-burt-reynolds","tag-canada-2","tag-car-hire","tag-car-hire-issues","tag-detroit-2","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-httpwww-amazon-co-uk","tag-httpwww-erichall-eu","tag-les-guis","tag-paris-2","tag-riom","tag-tgv","tag-toronto","tag-usa-2","tag-zaventem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6610,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions\/6610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}