Loi-Lovre World Tour 2015, Part 2.

Really, this is part three of a series. But it's called Part 2 because it's the second installment from the year 2015. I didn't really plan that very well. Sorry.

Part Three: Arrival in Perth.

We landed, went through customs (simple), picked up our bags (simple) then got into a very long line for the security check. I think most of what they're looking for in security is related to animals and produce, and for whatever reason, they aren't all that suspicious of married couples traveling with toddlers. We got waved right through without anyone looking inside our bags.

Australia has good reason to be careful about people bringing animals and produce into the country. I know this, because one of their most popular reality shows is all about their TSA equivalents catching people trying to smuggle those things (and untaxed cigarettes) into the country. As far as the animals go, today's caution stems largely from a past event in which the colonizing Brits (is there any other kind?) thought it'd be fun to hunt (and probably eat) rabbits in Australia. So they imported rabbits. Of course, the rabbits reproduced in magnificent numbers. Partly because there weren't any predators to eat them, and partly because that's what rabbits do. They also eat all the stuff that indigenous species were eating before the rabbits' arrival, which kind off screws with the previously existing natural balance of things.

Fortunately, this infestation of rabbits and the devastation of the greenery didn't escape the keen eyed imperialists colonists. The obvious thing to do was to import some foxes. Foxes like to eat rabbits, so the rabbit problem would certainly and quickly be solved, plus Brits with horses and hounds like to hunt foxes, so in the unlikely event that the fox population got unwieldy, the proper response would be to simply expand the areas in which fox hunts are conducted by bringing the dignified hobby of fox hunting to this newly acquired bit of British real estate. Pretty much everyone wins. Except the rabbits. And the things that the rabbits squeezed out by taking the food. And the veggies that the rabbits were decimating by eating.

So the foxes came along and were delighted to find that Australia was ripe with prey, most of which was much easier to catch than a rabbit. Recall that Oz is home to the critter aptly named “sloth.” Anyway, the foxes went about eating lots of startled native species that hadn't ever had to worry about predators before and hadn't yet evolved into things that can run or dig or fly. Hunting was easy, so the foxes pretty much ignored the rabbits in the process. Before long, this led to an excess of both rabbits and foxes, and further compromised the prior status quo as far as the natural balance of things. I am unaware of how effective the pony riding Brits' hunting expeditions may have been in eradicating either the rabbits or the foxes. There are still rabbits and there are still foxes there, so I guess the success rate wasn't 100%. Weird, huh?

After getting a quick wave through security, we were finally walking to the car rental desk area of the airport. The [low budget] company we'd rented a car from doesn't have a desk in the airport, which we didn't know until we couldn't find them. D borrowed a phone from the nice guy at the Hertz desk and called the number, which connected her to one of those robots that say something about how important your call is and how sorry they are to not be available. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that, press 3 for some other thing, and finally a real person answered.

… a real person who answers the phone at the local government's “Reporting a Traffic Emergency” office hotline. They had no idea how we'd gotten through to them by dialing through the phone system at the car rental place. Though perhaps urgent, our situation didn't seem to merit a response by emergency personnel.

D hung up, called again and this time got through to another guy who told us that the car rental company we'd booked with was closed for the day. He's the guy who picks up after hours customers and takes them to their reserved cars,.When the regular office has an after hours customer, they bring the rental paperwork and the car to another location (where this guy was), and then he takes care of handing off the car and getting the proper signatures on the forms. But the problem was that the rental company hadn't left a car for any after hours customers that day. No keys, no contract, nothing.

D explained our situation. It was now after 8 pm on a Sunday, darker and colder than we'd expected for Australia, we were a 40 minute drive away from our lodging, and we were two hungry people with a very feverish sick kid. The guy said “hold on,” then after a couple minutes returned to the phone. “Some other customers left a car here a couple hours ago, and we've got a dozen or so car seats for kids, so how about I come pick you up and you can just have this car?”

YES.

So we took that car, and about a half hour down the road we realized we hadn't signed a contract, no one had copies of our licenses, and we hadn't given them a credit card number (though the rental was prepaid, you still have to provide that in case you wreck their car). I made a joke about driving a stolen car that's fitted with a GPS locator, but my beloved bride wasn't laughing. At all.

Our lodging was at a B&B which offered a converted railroad mail car for lodging. It was very quaint, very comfortable and very cute. We slept pretty well despite the kiddo being really out of sorts, and in the morning we awoke, wondering what idiot's car alarm was blaring outside. We wondered this for a few minutes and talked about how inconsiderate some people can be at such an early daylight hour. Then we noticed that our son was playing with the rental car key fob. Ahem.

We headed further south, and after we'd driven another couple hours away from Perth we got a phone call from a woman at the car rental place. I'll call her “Amateur Assertive,” as she started off pretty certain that we ought to not have the car and that we should return to their office to trade it for the proper car right away. They'd sent a confirmation email, she said, about three hours before we'd landed. D explained that three hours before we landed, we were on an airplane and she had no way to check her email mid-flight. Then we found out they'd sent the confirmation email to the agency in the US that had arranged the rental in the first place, which meant that we'd never see it anyway.

I thought it was kind of silly for a car rental place that serves an international airport to send confirmation emails to their customers during a time that their customer s would certainly still be on airplanes. We had a copy of their contract, and it clearly stated we'd be landing after hours and thus picking up the car after hours. And it was prepaid, so leaving a car for us – just in case we actually showed up – seemed reasonable to me.

D reminded me of the exchange she'd had with the car rental company when she was trying to arrange a child seat. She sent three emails, two of which had gone unanswered. The third one got a reply that said something like “for such inquiries, you'll need to contact the Perth office.” Her inquiry had been addressed to – and was answered by – perthoffice@rentalcarclowns.com.au, so we'd really been at a loss to make sense of it. She'd finally called in person during Australia's business hours so that she could talk to someone in person and get things sorted out that way.

After a short conversation with D, the car rental customer service lady was – without us asking – discounting our rate and telling us what a horrible thing it was that a car rental place would do something like this to a mother with a sick child in the dark on a Sunday. Of course it would be fine for us to keep the car. They asked us to check the oil and the tire pressures just to be sure everything was ok. I checked the oil (there was some), and the tires looked mostly round so we gave it our own stamp of approval.

We drove through very cute small towns along the way, ate an abundance of savory pies sold at an abundance of bakeries along the side of the road (these pies are far better than any description can do justice), stopped at some white sand beaches that belong on postcards and for some reason are void of humans, drove through the Australian Valley of the Giants and walked on the Skywalk thing they have there, and a few other touristy things. The scenery and the stops along the way were all really, really interesting. Beaches were just plain stunning. Plants everywhere were beautiful. All of this was eclipsed, more than we'd have liked, by the kiddo still being sick. We had as much fun as we could, but once again we were each worrying more than we admitted.

We had a couple days scheduled to spend in Albany, though we missed most of the things we'd hoped to see because we were fretting over the kiddo. By now, he'd gone a few days without food (but he was drinking lots and lots), so we called the nurse hotline; figured out where the nearest doctor's office was, visited a pediatrician, filled a prescription, and got our typically feisty little boy back on the path to good health. This was a lot less simple and fun that it might seem by that hasty description but it all went over pretty well. And health care for the uninsured tourist is far cheaper in Australia than it is for the over-insured American in America. So there's that.

Among our final stops before returning to Perth was a visit to the city of Freemantle. Known as “Freo” to the Australians, this was the first place we'd been since departing Portland that I actually thought I might be able to live. Lots of great shops, right on the water, huge parks with playgrounds, great food. Mostly, though, it has a really good feel.

We found our B&B pretty easily with our stolen Atlas, and were both concerned and unsurprised to find that the front door was locked. We called the number on the brochure, and whoever answered the door told us the code to unlock the door and where we'd find the key to our room. Easy enough. We had a really pleasant evening walking around the neighborhood and eventually found a restaurant with outdoor seating and a menu that looked pretty good.

For those of you who know me on Facebook, this restaurant is where I took the photo of an $11 bottle [a cute little 12oz bottle] of local beer. A few days prior, I'd paid $9 for a draught pint and that had seemed excessive. For some reason, I'd overlooked that the average price for an average hamburger is $20. Welcome to Australia.

We made good use of the car and returned it when we were done with it. Nobody said anything about us having taken it without a rental contract or that we'd returned it with a road atlas from a different car rental company and a child seat from yet another different company.

Arriving back at the Perth airport, I was happy that we weren't going to fly with Emirates [I hold grudges longer than necessary] nor Scoot [this goes beyond a grudge]. Today I'd try, for the first time, Virgin Airlines. Owned by the fabulous billionaire playboy Sir David Branson, Virgin is known for being fun, staffed by people with a sense of humor, and being way cooler than the typical airline. Given what seems to pass for typical on this half of the globe (think 'Greyhound Bus Lines, 1970' and you'll make sense of it), I was looking forward to something better than the regional status quo.

We were among the very first to board (traveling with a toddler has its benefits) and I stowed our bags in the overhead bin. On every plane we've used thus far on this trip, the bins swing upward and tuck into the ceiling; and given that D (who is not exactly tall) had to stoop to move over to her seat, I went ahead and pushed the underside of the encroaching bin upward.

Except it didn't move. I wiggled it a little, pushed harder, then started looking it over, thinking there must be a safety latch or something. The line of passengers who wanted to find their seats reached from me – in row 24 – to the door at the front of the plane. I should have just moved out of the way, but I wanted to quickly snap the bin closed and be done with it.

A woman 3 or 4 people back in line asked, in perfect Australian, if I was having trouble.

 

“Well, I just want to close the bin, but it seems like it's stuck.”

 

She reached up and pulled the door downward, thus closing the bin. Everyone in the line smirked in a special Aussie way. D said something about me blushing. She said something about me blushing several more times during the flight and she also used the word “hilaaaaaaarious” a lot more than she really needed to. Apparently she and the woman and everyone in line behind me hadn't adequately made their collective point.

 

Virgin did pretty well in this old airplane that seemed like it should have had propellers instead of jet engines and we were in Adelaide pretty quickly. We deplaned, threw about $20 worth of produce (that's 2 apples and 1 banana) into the quarantine bin (which is not easy to find by any stretch of the imagination) as instructed, and picked up our bags and the stroller we'd bought in Overpriced Hong Kong for a triple what it would have cost in the US.

 

Virgin's baggage handlers bent the stroller. The canopy part. We can still use it. I'd been hoping that this flight would be the one that didn't irritate me (aside from the unnecessarily complicated overhead bins), partly because I thought we were due a perfect airline experience by now and partly because Richard Branson is plain sexy and I don't want his toy airline to taint his otherwise perfect image.

 

It finally dawned on me. Airlines, everywhere, are horrible. I love to travel, and enjoy riding in airplanes, I like looking out the window, and I still marvel at the ability to be just about anywhere on Earth within 24 hours. It's pretty close to teleportation magic, really. Despite all that, in this weak moment I instantly became fully convinced that all my future travel would be by boat.

 

And I remained thus convinced until taking a boat while vacationing in Australia.