The Invisible Car

This journey has been planned. I mean planned. Down to the mile. I could show you my town-to-town spread sheets, day-by-day itineraries, all hotels are booked for 18 days, we can’t get ill, we can’t get delayed. We’re not 24 years old and can’t just “go with it”. I’m 56 and want comfort and stability after driving 400 miles a day. We are driving a sodding long way and we want a sodding nice car… a pussy-killing smooth rider with a gyroscopic coffee cup holder.

‘Good morning Sir, welcome to National Car Rental in Bemidji, have you come far?’

The grade one luxury car was booked and paid for 9 months ago, I have duplicates of the agreements in my “week one” folder, my phone has a photo of the reservation in a “reservations” folder and I think I emailed that folder to the iPad. 

They haven’t got a car for us. There is No Car.

They are very big girls who are a little confused. They “don’t get many one-way long-drive drop-offs”, they haven’t actually got a car for our meticulously planned drive from one end of their country to the other. We seem to be the only people to have ever driven from Bemidji to New Orleans. Ever.

They “borrow” a Honda Accord from the bloke in the next car hire booth which will be ready for us in a couple of hours. We are in such a state of bewilderment that we accept this fetid and unclean vehicle and thank Jesus that we have a slight window in The Schedule to sort this out. They’ll get us a proper vehicle tomorrow. Driving back to the hotel in the shuttle bus, the driver explains the finer points of duck-hunting to two people who won’t kill spiders; ‘Ya just put the decoys out and ya shoot the hell out of ’em!’ Of course you do.

We go to the headwaters of the Mississippi River in our tiny car, and it is overwhelming and moving. In the inevitable souvenir shop, where I inevitably buy stuff, the pleasant ladies thank us for speaking to them. It’s a first.

‘Your accents are so lovely, like Downton Abbey.’

‘Thank you, yours are lovely too,’ and they are; gentle and tuneful, imagine Fargo if every character was slightly posher.

We walk across the Mississippi River in the warm constant drizzle with a group of rather pleasant young school children, they too think we are English Period Drama superstars, except one slightly odd child who is convinced I am from Top Gear. Hmmm, “Which one?” I sadly wonder as we walk barefoot through the mud back to the closed visitor centre.

Besides the kids, we are the only people here. The river will be over three miles wide in a few hundred miles and we have just strolled across it in warm rain and bought the t-shirt. Two t-shirts.

Back at the care hire. I am now Lord Grantham from TV’s Downton Abbey and I demand a magnificent stallion! This car could have been dumped at a gypsy camp in Rhyl, this is not the gleaming machine that will eat up the next few thousand miles like mechanical butter. Get the right car now fat girl or I will blind you with long words in a posh accent for the next ten minutes and you will be subject to my will…

Huge failure. We have to drive 275 miles to Minneapolis airport to get The Right Car. Hey ho, we’re heading there anyway tomorrow. The Schedule will not allow for anger.

Bemidji is our first experience of small town northern USA; not quite the mid west. We have lunch in a diner that is predictably “straight outta the 50’s/60’s” – and it’s great; we wander to the Bemidji Organic Co-Operative where we are again complemented on our accents, I’m getting to like this now, and am starting to constantly talk in a loud Kenneth Brannagh voice. The town is deathly quiet and Ashly buys moccasins that are so beautiful I feel tears welling-up. The lady in the moccasin shop warns us quite intensely about Limes Disease.

We are the only people walking. There’s a hippy feel to the place. We’d almost forgotten how polite people are in rural America; cars stop to allow Ashly to stand in the middle of the Main Street to take a picture of an establishment named Toasty Beavers. In South East England she would have been mown down with a snarl. We talk about the incident excitedly for half an hour.

Night on Bemidji lakeside at generic Hilton with the UK election result. What’s the matter with people? They’ll regret it very soon. The United Kingdom seems pleasingly far away. It is.

No map needed for today.  It’s just down the road.