California Rental Car Trouble

After landing in San Francisco Airport late Friday night, my father went to Hurtz [sic] to pick up his rental car.

Hurtz is supposedly one of the top 2 car rental companies in the United States if not the world.  But this time around, they sucked.

Before we boarded our flight, my father got an email from Hurtz saying that we had been upgraded to an SUV for our 3 day weekend rental along with the parking slot that we would find our car (thus avoiding any lines at the counter).  Sounded pretty promising!

But when we arrived at the SFO Hurtz parking lot, we didn't see his name on the #1 Club Gold big board. Not a big deal. But when we went to the assigned parking spot that was emailed to him hours before, it wasn't an SUV. And the name tag had someone else's name on it.

So it was 7:30PM Pacific (10:30PM Eastern) and after a 6 hour flight that didn't serve food, my parents were getting agitated. Especially since my father was bragging to my mother that Hurtz was the best car rental company and that we could just go to the car and drive off immediately.

But now, he found himself waiting at the counter while 2 foreigners were taking their sweet time booking their car rentals for the weekend with their foreign debit cards.

Eventually, they called my father up to the desk and they explained to him that they had him arriving at 3PM that afternoon instead of 7PM.   Since he wasn't there at 3PM, they cancelled his reservation. WTF?  My father showed him the email confirmation showing 7PM, but you can imagine how invested this particular employee was in this little Hurtz IT debacle.

Despite saying he didn't have any full size vehicles left, he somehow found one after punching some keys on his computer - a "wonderful" Chevy Malibu.  After walking to the other end of the parking lot with all our luggage (and no Smart Cart), we were finally on our way.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon when we took the car to drive to Santa Cruz to see Big Basin Redwoods State Park.  My mother had never seen the majestic California redwood and my father really wanted her (and me) to experience it.  The drive as just under 2 hours but we had nothing to do all day (and we had already been to San Francisco a few months earlier so not much more to see).


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We made good time driving and we reached Big Basin right around 2PM.  As we went up the mountain road, my mother started to panic as we went higher and higher on the winding road.  The view was beautiful but also scary because many parts of the road weren't protected by barriers.

My mother's mind (being raised Russian) immediately went to "worst case scenario" and started imagining her family falling thousands of feet off the edge. She even started to get nauseous as we kept turning sharply to make our way up the mountain.

But my father was getting frustrated.  He wanted my mother to enjoy the scenery, but instead she was freaking out and trying not to vomit.  Kind of the opposite reaction he was hoping for.  So he pulled over at a  "Scenic Outlook" spot and tried to park next to a big SUV.  But suddenly, the front of the car dropped, and my father slammed on the breaks.

We were stuck in a ditch.

The photo here isn't our car, but my father wasn't in the mood to whip out his Canon to memorialize the moment.  His mind started racing about having to call a tow truck to drive up the mountain and get his rental car out.  He started thinking how much that would cost.  And how he didn't have AAA.  And how the premium of his car insurance would go up.  And how he didn't use the right credit card to rent the car (because it only provided secondary coverage and not primary).

The front tires weren't getting any traction.  So he took a chance and drove forward a bit until the front wheels got on the ground.  Then he tried to back up. But now, the undercarriage was too low and kept getting caught on the pavement.  He repeated this 5 or 6 times.  Note:  the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Luckily for us, a nearby cyclist was watching all the events unfold and offered his advice.  He suggested we start to turn parallel to the road in the hopes that it would allow the wheels to make their way back onto the pavement.  After a bunch of back and forth driving, we were out of the ditch!

We had the car checked at a Jiffy Lube in Santa Cruz and apparently things were fine (except for a dent in the undercarriage), but we returned the car at the airport the next day and didn't mention anything.  It's been 3 weeks so hopefully someone else has rented the car and is now on the hook.

Of course, my father tells me, "None of this would have happened if they just upgraded me to the SUV in the first place."