Res Ipsa Loquitur

We picked up our luggage and went to pick up our rental car from Avis....you know, the "we try harder" people. May I just say that after our experience, they don't try nearly hard enough. There was a gentleman in front of Mike in the registration line having a hissy fit. I soon found out why.

It seems that Avis in its infinite wisdom was only running one shuttle van that night. So their staff told that gentleman (and Mike) to leave his wife & their luggage sitting at the shuttle pickup point while he went to get the car. The gentleman (and Mike) understandably had a problem with leaving his wife alone in a parking garage in a strange city. But once we saw the long line waiting for the shuttle, I told Mike to go ahead and arranged myself with my back to the wall within sight of the line. Mike wasn't thrilled with the idea, but figured that a) I hadn't eaten in 6 hrs, and b) I hadn't had a smoke in 3 so he pitied the fool that tried to mug nicotine-withdrawal Low Blood Sugar Satan. I was a little cranky.

It took about an hour and a half, but we finally get our car & head out to the motel. It's 12:30 am. We'd both been up since about 6 am, I had to work a 4 hr. shift before we left, and we're both dog-tired. We had problems finding the Apopka HoJo that we'd made reservations for online, primarily because we were looking for a 3 star hotel as advertised and not a dump that catered to contractors & hookers.

We almost left when we pulled into the parking lot, but by then it was almost 2 am. We checked in and as we were trudging to our room, we heard the most hideous noise coming from the room adjacent to ours. I'm not sure whether they had a dog in heat or they were doing things I'd rather not think about, but it sounded bad. We opened the door to our room and Mike said "First thing tomorrow I'm looking for a different hotel." It was a dump. It was the kind of place that you wouldn't walk around the room barefoot for fear of catching something. The air conditioner made this horrible metallic screech all night. There was a workboot footprint on the bathroom floor. It was that bad.

The next morning, as we were going to eat breakfast before Mike dropped me off at the seminar, Mike remarked that the Mustang we rented really got crappy gas mileage. We'd only gotten a little over a hundred miles on a full tank of gas. It wasn't until Mike used up the next tank of gas and got almost 300 miles on it that we realized what had to have happened.

Someone drained our gas tank while we were sleeping at that crappy little hotel.

Yeah. We found another hotel the next day. But that's another story.