Well, we had a plan for this weekend. Really. It's just...well...

Weeks ago, we decided to go down to Bristol this weekend, to avoid Guy Fawkes' Day in Leeds. Over the past week, as I got more and more stressed and unhappy about various things, I started counting down not only days but hours until we'd be out of town, deep in the countryside and deeply relaxed. I booked off yesterday afternoon and all of Monday from work, so that we could get to Bristol by 8pm last night and have all of Saturday and Sunday and part of Monday there.

Then our car broke (as documented in an earlier journal entry). The garage wouldn't even look at it for a full week. We thought it wouldn't be fixed in time, so we booked a rental car through Enterprise. But--surprise!--our car was fixed, for a relatively minor £92, and we were told all was well, so--on Thursday afternoon--we canceled the rental car. We both got off work yesterday at one, hurried home, I began to pack at 2pm while Patrick drove out to get gas for the trip...

...and about twenty minutes later, Patrick phoned to say the car had broken down again, and would not start. Gaaahh!

I booked another rental car online, then called Enterprise to confirm that yes, we really would have a car at 5pm (just over 2 hours off, at that point). The nice lady on the phone reassured me that yes, there would definitely be a car. Patrick and I shrugged, took deep breaths, and forcibly made ourselves relax and just accept that we'd be getting into Bristol late. We hung out for an hour, watched a couple of "Scrubs" episodes, and then Patrick got up and started to get ready to head down to the bus, to go pick up the car.

And the phone rang. It was Enterprise, to say that they didn't have a car for us after all, and that they wouldn't have one until 9:30 Saturday morning.

I cannot even express how frustrating that conversation was. And of course, what made it worse was that, if Patrick and I hadn't canceled our earlier reservation in the first place, we would have been almost to Bristol by that time. And, of course, we'd both taken an afternoon off work just to end up sitting around waiting for a car that didn't come.

So, now, it's now past 10 am Saturday morning, and we're still waiting for the Enterprise driver (who was due over forty-five minutes ago) to come pick Patrick up. (When the phone rang an hour ago, we both leapt to the same conclusion: oh God, they're going to back out again. But no. They had just lost our address. Again.)

I can't imagine ever using Enterprise again.

Oof. Not the weekend we were counting on. And drat it, wouldn't it be nice if we could be at World Fantasy in lovely Madison right now...ah well.

The good news is that the awesome SarahP sent me the perfect remedy for times like these: The Exploits and Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy, by Elizabeth Aston. I loved this book so much (Regency woman dresses up as man, flees to Italy to be a singer! Ooohh!), I read it pretty much straight through every moment of my free time from the time I got it in the mail to the time I finished it, and then I ran out to Borders and bought Elizabeth Aston's first book, Mr. Darcy's Daughters. Enormously fun, witty, and excellent at conveying period flavor.

Have a good weekend, everybody!