Last Thursday morning found the hubs and I strolling into Enterprise Rental Car at the bright and early time of 7:30 AM. After three of our four cars ceasing to function for a myriad of reasons this past week, I had made an emergency reservation for a car for us to travel to the Idaho State Shotgun event in so that our daughter could use our car to get to work while we were gone.
I have rented cars from our local Coeur d'Alene Enterprise branch countless times for trips and various other reasons, so the process is well known to us, and really rather remarkably easy and painless.
Thursday's rental was similar, save one little thing.
The delightful young woman at the counter pointed out the window and told us that, "I have a brand new Chevy Malibu for you."
As my eyes lit upon the shiny bright white mode of conveyance, the hubs made a strangled sound and blurted, "It has California plates!"
The young woman assisting us in our transaction didn't skip a beat and replied, "I can make a sign for you that says it's a rental!"
Me, I was instantly filled to the brim with mirth, as I am a bit of a mischievous creature on occasion, and truly, there could be no greater adventure to be found than driving a gleaming white sedan with California plates through rural Montana and Idaho!
With the straightest face that I could muster, I assured the awesome clerk that the car was perfect, and took the still smarting at our bad vehicle luck Hawaiian towards our new chariot for the weekend.
A little regional cultural enlightment note must be inserted here. Over the past few years, our state and Montana have been infused with folks fleeing The Sunshine State. Now me personally, I don't care where you come from, but in all fairness, it is a touch hard on a local culture when thousands of people from another culture arrive somewhere, especially to a place that doesn't have the infrastructure for it. Things have been rather interesting around here due to the influx of imports, and tensions are elevated to the point where exhibitions of un-neighborly behavior are seen quite often.
Which leaves us back to the gleaming white sedan with the blasphemous plates. It wasn't long before we got to experience our first incident.
Up here in the Pacific Northwest there are a lot of pickup trucks, and many of them are lifted diesels. One of the things that many of the drivers of said pickup trucks like to do as a bit of a flex is to roll coal. Many of the diesel trucks have aftermarket tuners that allow you to fiddle with the truck's tuning, and if you tune your beast just right, you can envelop the cars behind and next to you in a black cloud that screams EFF YOU PENGUINS!! (Okay, the scream part may be an exaggeration, but I swear I can hear the turbo saying that as the truck accelerates away).
Anyway, a bit after we crossed into Montana, and a mighty diesel pickup approached us from behind. I noticed that it had one of those fancy body wraps on it too, a scene of mountains and trees cut from black vinyl. Truly, there was no truck within miles to rival it in its manliness.
As that truck passed us, its driver hammered the throttle down and bathed our little white car in cloud of black smoke for several seconds. (Our son was riding behind us with our friend and his son, apparently there was much laughter as they witnessed the slight).
It was then that I christened the little white Malibu the Jesus car as it was while riding in it that I was to be punished for no sin of my own.
I also started drawing the sign,
Along the way we also got hit with a ball bearing of some kind, thankfully it left no damage that we could tell, and go stuck in behind a road rage incident in Idaho Falls between a local and an impatient Texas car. No one got hurt, but the finger of friendship was flashed repeatedly between both parties.
It was the next morning that I knew that making the sign was a good choice, as we found ourselves out on the old Snake River Plain in an ancient lava field with dozens of firearm enthusiast families from throughout Idaho. I took some electrical tape and stuck my It's A Rental sign in the back window.
It was then that the picture taking began.
I had people stop me and shake my hand, giggling over the sign. In fact, it was a topic of general amusement at the event.
This morning, I turned The Jesus car in to its home. I was almost sad to see it go. As I unstuck the sign from the rear window I thought fondly of all the glares and radiating anger that the car elicited from the citizens of our state and our neighboring state to the east. It's really rather sad that it's come to this. I mean, when I was a kid California was the place to be, and here just a few decades later people are downright nasty about its inhabitants. Part of me understands, I am not a big fan of consumer-driven, keeping up with the Joneses, I'm better than you mentality, but I have tons of lovely friends and family in that state, and I really wish people would just judge behavior of individuals rather than lumping all people together because of geographical inhabitance reasons.
Maybe my time in the white car of persecution was good for me after all😉
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's also hated because of hipsters by certain groups of people iPhone.
