-Saturday June 30th Morning-
Last year ASCO offered a deal with National Car Rental, you could join their Emerald Club at no cost and get up to a 20% discount, so I opted in thinking I’d never use it, but it might be worth checking out the next time we rented a car.
As luck would have it, for this trip to Seattle, they we a little less than the price of the second tier agency we usually use, so we stepped up a bit on rental car company ladder.
When the taxi* dropped us off at the rental car place we were surprised that there was not a soul around to help us, just an empty computer terminal and a sea of cars.
*Our plane got into Seattle at midnight Friday, so we took a shuttle to our hotel to get a 1/2 nights sleep. When we got up Saturday morning rather than take the hotel shuttle back to the airport and then get a rental car shuttle from the airport to the off-site rental place we took a taxi to make it one shorter ride instead of two longer ones. I’ve got aninteresting taxi ride story for another day.
Thinking there must be some kind of mistake we go up one flight on the escalator to the rental counters. The nice lady put down her crossword, looked at my paperwork, said that all I needed to do was go back down and pick any car from the intermediate aisle.
There were a bunch of Chevy Impalas sitting about, but then I spotted a familiar profile. It was a 2012 GLS (AKA base model), only a year newer that the Purple Whale, so at least all the controls would be right where I was used to them being. It had only 4,000 miles more on the odometer, so all the interior panel rattles were right where we were used to them being too.