Here I am at the laundromat waiting for my clothes. And as weird as it sounds, I rather enjoy it. I guess it’s because it just affords me time to slow down, relax and think. Then again, so does smoking a cigar. “Yeah, but right now you’re smoking a cigar and doing your laundry, amigo.” Anyway, I guess this is a good time to share how my week unfolded. It didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would have. Let’s start from my arrival into Bozeman last Sunday.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. As you can tell we are stopped here on the tarmac waiting for a gate to open. The gate we were supposed to arrive at is currently occupied by a plane with maintenance issues. As soon as a gate opens up, we will let you know. I’ve been informed it should take about 15 minutes or so,” was the voice that came over the intercom.
It took another hour before the gate was available to us. So, there we sat, in the plane, on the tarmac.
Okay, let me go get my rental really quick. It shouldn’t take long, and I can secure it before my luggage hits the baggage claim area.
“Okay, sir, we have a compact vehicle reserved for you,” said the older gentleman on the other side of the counter.
“Is there any way that you could possibly get me into something a little bigger, say a minivan or a mid-size vehicle?” I replied.
“No, sir, we can’t. That’s what’s in our system,” the older gentleman replied, rather curmudgeonly.
For what my work was going to entail, a compact vehicle simply would not work.
Hesitantly, it being Sunday and all, I called the travel coordinator who arranged my vehicle rental. After some back and forth, she, because it was a Sunday, could not get a hold of corporate in order to get me a bigger vehicle. In the end, she reserved a bigger vehicle for me and asked me to put a credit card down and first thing Monday morning she would get it transferred onto the corporate account. Yeah, that was the beginning of a nightmare. For the next four days, try as she may, the travel coordinator could not get HERTZ to transfer the vehicle to the corporate account; They wouldn’t and didn’t want to do it. In the meantime, I was racking up quite a bit of daily charges on my credit card. After the fourth day, the only solution was for me to drive seventy miles back to Bozeman, return the vehicle and pick up another vehicle; this time from Enterprise, which, at this point, was going to be on the corporate account.
As for my outdoor activities during this ordeal, as I predicted in the last post, I didn’t get to do much. I was so swamped with Logistics and meetings that my days were consumed with Scouts and office work. But, now that everything is settled with my vehicle, I will get more time to go exploring and hopefully get some fishing in.
Oh, my scouting did involve going to various ranches with some beautiful backcountry and scenery. As we get deeper into work, I’ll be sharing some of those pictures. The picture above is just a teaser of things to come.
