On arrival at destination, after a bit of a diversion, I got out to inspect the damage and sure enough it was as bad as you would generally expect a rock hitting a plastic bumper at 70mph to be... Not only scraped but also dented and cracked. Having established when we picked up the car that part of the reason the company had cheaper rental rates was due to their extortionate 'damage' fees ("any scratch or stone chip over 1mm in paint or windscreen will be charged... Damage excess is £750 or pay £18 per day to lower the excess...") we had been treating our much disliked Astra with kid gloves and flinching every time we drove over loose gravel... Only the day before I had found a scratch on the inner edge of the drivers door that wasn't noted when we inspected the car on pickup and was already anticipating an argument over that. With only one day to go on the rental I had hoped we might get out unscathed...
So now being in a 'right grump' I probably wasn't immediately in the mood to properly appreciate where we had ended up, which was in fact the expansive Haynes Motor Museum, established by the Haynes family of Haynes Owner's Manuals fame, the largest in the UK. However before long the camera was out and I was once again marvelling at many wonderful things with wheels, many displays much more UK focused than other places I have been, which gave a nice local flavour... Although in honesty there is only so much time I can spend looking at Morris, Wolsleys and Hillmans. Astons and Ferraris on the other hand...
And Auburns and Dusenbergs...
And the odd Countach and XJ220
Then add in a fair amount of Americana and some other bits, and I was happy as a pig in very expensive poop.
We were back to the museum to finish the second half the next morning, then it was on the road and London bound. We stopped long enough to throw bags off at our kind host's house and then it was off to face the music with the rental car company. After about another hour in London traffic.
Our only hope re the rental car return was that the staff would be as inept as they were when we picked it up, and the place would be just as packed with irate customers waiting an hour or more to pick a car up or drop it off... As it turned out there were actually more staff around than customers, although the competence quotient had not increased. We stood for a while listening to yet another rant from a disgruntled customer who was engaging half the office staff and arguing, quite fairly I thought, that it was extortionate that he was being charged for a scratch he had put on a wheel that already had two large curb gouges on it, meaning that likely two previous customers had also been charged for damage to the same wheel... Effectively meaning the company would have charged three times for one repair... Which they also hadn't actually had carried out. Pretty futile though, as some young corporate rental car drone in a business shirt recited the company damage charging policy verbatim in a mindless pseudo-polite voice that made you instantly want to inflict violence to his facial region.
Our moment of reckoning came in the form of one of the mid level vehicle ranglers who we had seen on our first visit, also a chap of mediocre competence and patchy English, not ranked high enough to rent cars out, but tasked with running around fetching and sorting vehicles and, as it turned out, handling returns. He efficiently bustled out to where I had parked the car, behind another row of vehicles facing nose-in so you didn't get a view of the front from any distance... Still brisk and efficient he ran his hands over each wheel looking for curbing, bent down and eyeballed both sides for door dings, looked inside for interior issues, scrutinised the windscreen for chips, walked around the front and bent down... He walked back, clipboard in hand, complete with the diagram of the car with all the individual scratches and stone chips noted from our pickup inspection. He looked like he was frowning a bit. But then he generally did anyway. He held out the clipboard with the diagram. I eyeballed the front of the little car in the picture, conscious that there was no noting saying "Hole in bumper" when we signed to take possession of it... He said, in some thick accent or other "All good! No damage." And with, that we signed it off...
Now you might think that would be the end of it, and technically it was, since our friend had signed the car back in as inspected and a-ok... (And for all I know he might have noted the dint in the front and ignored it, as it seemed the staff had quite a different standard as to what damage was worth reporting than the managers did...). But having seen the various dramas with other customers I knew it would be distinctly possible that they might try to ping us for the bumper even after the fact. What followed was an extremely long 15 minutes standing in the dusty yard, waiting for the courtesy van of salvation to whisk us to the train station, during which time we watched the car being driven away to be cleaned... And I knew once he had hosed the bugs off, the cleaning guy, if he was even remotely competent, would know he should probably check to see if the rather decent rock impact to the front bumper had been noted in the inspection, lest he get blamed for it... No van came... We acted casual, next noting the cleaning guy a few minutes later coming back and getting one of the business shirt wearing reps, clipboard in hand, and taking him around to the cleaning bay... Minutes passed.. Slowly... No van... Then that rep walked back to the portacabin office... Then headed back toward our car in the company of the suited manager... The same anally retentive one who had actually signed the car over to us on day 1, and 'Tsk tsked' when we did the initial inspection at the number of "chargeable" minute stone chips that had not been noted on the car's sheet... And then I knew what was coming... The arguing... The finger pointing at clipboard diagram... The attempts to get us to fess up even though all parties had signed off on the return form... But actually what came first was the van, just at that moment, and in we piled and away we went, beaming with silent gratitude at the talkative and not inconsiderably smelly (or was that the other American passenger in the front?) shuttle driver.
So, if ever you find yourself travelling to the UK, do ask me (if I know you) what rental car company NOT to use, although I will not mention them here for fear of litigation.
Suitably buoyed by our good fortune and somewhat minorly celebratory, it was back on the train once again (feeling like a right Londoner by now!! Quite proficient at standing around pressed up against strangers these days...) and into the city for a proper session at a proper pub full of proper (?) Londoners. I am not sure they were real proper Londoners mind you because nobody got stabbed or head butted or started a soccer... Oops, 'football'... riot... Oh well, guess my cultural experience is as yet incomplete. I must endeavour to make a list of the pubs we have frequented actually, it would be quite long... One thing I like about England, there is a nice old pub or a nice old church pretty much on every corner. Anyway, a good night out was had and then back on the trains and home to bed... Also without any stabbings or other kinds of murders. Thus endeth Thursday.
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