Switcheroo

When was the last time that you reserved a car and actually got a car even similar to what you reserved?  Out of about a dozen times that I’ve rented cars I think I’ve gotten what I reserved maybe a third of the time.  In almost every case the car rental company doesn’t have what was reserved and so they offer you a free “upgrade.”  In every case the upgrade was for a vehicle that was far less fuel efficient than what I had reserved.  To me that’s not an upgrade.  Unless this is related to the “Gas Scam” (see below) the car rental company doesn’t really benefit from this.  As a customer it becomes frustrating because my potentially significant fuel costs just increased.  When I rented from Alamo and the “mini-suv” that I reserved wasn’t available I was offered a full size vehicle.  When I said I didn’t want that because of fuel costs they offered me a Pruis at no additional charge.  In that case I made out better and I was quite pleased (except that the lot attendant couldn’t start the car and I had no idea how…but I figured it out eventually).

Insurance

Most people are aware that most personal auto insurance covers rental cars.  This means that you do not need to purchase additional insurance if you are happy with your own coverage.  In addition I’m almost certain that both Visa and Mastercard provide coverage if you purchase the rental using their credit cards.  I believe the credit card insurance benefit is only applicable if you do not have personal auto insurance.

I’m not even sure it’s possible anymore but I suppose you could rent a car using cash and you don’t have an auto insurance policy.  If you aren’t excessively wealthy you’d likely want to buy coverage from the rental company.  When I rented a few weeks ago they offered coverage at about $30.00 per day.  A full year of coverage at this price would be just shy of $11,000.  Would you pay 11 grand for auto insurance?  Of course people don’t consider this when they are at the rental counter with 15 frustrated people behind them.

Additional Drivers

Another way they rip you off is by charging for additional drivers.  Considering that they don’t provide insurance to you unless you pay for it I see no reason why it should cost extra to allow for an additional driver.  Alamo wanted to charge $10 per day for an additional driver.  Yeah right, I’m not paying an additional $100 for a 10 day vacation just so that Mary could drive the car.  Our entire rental was about $330 including $50 for a car seat rental.  To have an additional driver authorized to drive the vehicle they wanted to charge a 30% premium?

Gas Scam

What about the whole “bring it back empty/bring it back full” scam?  Most rental companies give you the option of pre paying for a full tank of gas at their “discounted” rate.  If you do that you need to bring the car back as close to empty as possible to get your moneys worth.  Forget that this is a major hassle; consider what they are actually charging you.  When I got to the rental counter this option listed out the capacity of the gas tank of the car that I had reserved.  Have you ever looked at the specs for your car?  My Toyota Celica has a 14 gallon tank.  Even when I was within one bar of empty and then filled the tank completely it took no more than 12 gallons.  This is because there is quite a bit of “reserve” fuel in the tank.  You can drive on empty for quite a while.  This means that it’s nearly impossible to actually return the tank empty and you’d risk missing your flight even if you could perform this magical feat.

If you consider a vehicle like a Celica with a 14 gallon tank and assume that you used 12 gallons then you gave back two gallons of gas for which they will not refund you.  They pre-charged you for $56.00 (14 gallons at $4 per gallon.  That means that the gas really cost you $4.67 per gallon.  Not only would it have been far cheaper to fill the car yourself but you would save yourself the hassle of trying to return the car empty instead of full.  In reality the car rental companies probably make out far better than this example.

In many cases the gas is precharged before you even get the actual vehicle you will be driving!  When I reserved a “mini-suv” Alamo offered the prepaid gas option for a Saturn Vue.  After signing the contract I picked up the car — which was NOT a Saturn Vue because they didn’t have any left on the lot.  I’m not sure how they’d rectify that, if at all.

We didn’t sell as much stuff as we wanted to.  We were hoping to sell all of the furniture but very little of it sold and it sold for less than we were hoping to get.  It’s hard to sell furniture at garage sales because few people are out looking to spend hundreds of dollars on antique furniture.  Oh well, it’s off to craigslist we go!

While we didn’t sell the furniture we did sell…the garage.  Actually we sold the entire house.  A couple stopped by and bought an item or two and I had a nice conversation with them.  They soon returned and asked if they could look around at our landscaping.  I thought it odd but since I had the house locked up I said “sure.”  Then they admitted that they came back because they wanted our house!  They said that they’d like to have the first bid if we decide to sell our house!  I took down their name and number and I’ll keep it in my “house” file.

Who knows, in a few years (or sooner…or later…) we might look back at this garage sale as the best thing we ever did.

I had a great race.  I ran the first mile in 6:45, the second in 6:40 and the final 1.1 miles in 7:08 (6:30 pace).  Weeks after the race I still can’t believe that I ran negative splits and that I finished in 20:33, a PR.  I finished third in my age group and 28th overall.

One of my long term running goals is to run a 5k under 20 minutes.  I’m certain that I will accomplish this but it’s going to take a while still.  30 seconds is a lot of time for a short race.

Mary, John, and Dan all ran too which made things even more fun.  Mary ran a great race.  She’s making progress in her times and is getting close to her “pre-pregnancy” pace.  John ran with Dan pushing him to run faster.  Dan also got a pee argh.  The official results are here.

Special thanks to my parents who watched Cassie while Mary and I ran the race and stuck around while we waited for awards and door prizes.  I won a shirt large enough to use as a boat sail.  Mary won a gift card to Tim Hortons.

I liked this race.  I might run it again next year.

We stayed at the Artful Lodger again this year.  It’s a nice clean B&B about 15 minutes outside of Utica in Clinton NY.  I really like staying there but I think they raised their rates and they require a two night minimum stay for Boilermaker weekend.  Next year we may find different accommodations.  We may use the GRTC Boilermaker bus if it is offered again or we (more likely) will take up our friend Matt’s offer
to stay at his home.

I didn’t run a smart race this year.  I should have known better since I’ve run the course twice already.  I started out too fast.  I wanted to maintain at least a 7:30 minute per mile pace.  That wasn’t a bad goal but I pushed too hard at the beginning where the largest hill is. The fourth (or fifth?) mile is completely downhill and rather steep. I pushed myself going down that hill and paid for it the rest of the
race.  My legs were tired and my stomach was upset.

I’ve never bought into the argument that headphones are a safety hazard on race courses but I was proven wrong.  While running down that downhill in the fourth mile I heard people shouting that a wheelchair participant was coming up (I wasn’t wearing headphones).  I peeked behind my shoulder and saw the wheelchair coming.  I also saw a guy to my left in the way of the wheel chair.  The guy was only a few feet away from me.  I shouted at the top of my lungs at the guy to get him to move out of the way but he didn’t notice I was there.  He couldn’t hear my shouting.  The wheelchair hit him on the side of the leg.  He clearly couldn’t hear people telling him to get out of the way.

I also saw, at about mile 9, a young woman collapse.  She was running along and then pretty much folded in half and fell onto the ground. When I passed her a spectator was on his way over to help her and she had stood back up.  She didn’t look like she was in good shape.  I hope she was OK but I’ll never know.

Seeing Mary, Cassie, and Marie helped me forget about the impending vomit rising from my stomach.  I pushed on for the rest of the race. I finished with a PR of 1:08:11 (a 7:19 average pace), about 8 minutes better than the previous year and 4 minutes beter than my most recent 15k.  Unfortunately there was a problem with the timing system and so my net “chip”) time for the race doesn’t exist.  My official time was about 1:10 as it took me about 2 minutes to reach the starting line.

After the race I met up with everyone (Marie, Corey, Mary, Cassie, Matt, and others).  We enjoyed the official post race party and then an unofficial post race party at the Saccos.  After that party we went to another post race party at Matt’s.  There might not be a whole lot in Utica and Rome NY but Uticians (yes, I just made that up) and Romans and are incredibly hospitable people!  Matt and the Sacco’s, if you read this, thank you again!

I’m hoping 2009 will be just like this year; another year, another Boilermaker, another PR, beer, and more friends.

If you’ve paid close attention to this website you already noticed that I added a link (on the left) to a shark attack map. Most people that know me know that I’m rather fascinated by sharks and particularly shark attacks. For quite some time I’ve been helping to maintain a map cataloging shark attacks around the world.

The shark attack map is not my map. It was started quite some time ago by “Bianca2000.” I’ve never met “Bianca.” I started contributing to her map because she was cool enough to leave her map open for contributions from anyone. Attacks posted by “endOfPath” are from me.

The map won an award from Platial (where it is hosted) in the outdoors category for 2007. I’m not sure why I never got around to posting here about the map. Since it is Shark Week I thought the timing was right to post about this. This is the one week out of the year that I actually wish I paid for television service (luckily I can rent Shark Week DVDs!).

]]> http://www.therowes.net/2008/08/07/shark-attack-map/feed http://www.therowes.net/2008/08/06/streetsale http://www.therowes.net/2008/08/06/streetsale#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:38:19 +0000 greg http://www.therowes.net/?p=255 Mary has organized the first (annual?) Matlyn Drive Streetsale.  It will be on August 16th from 8 AM to 4 PM.  More than 10 homes are participating.  That’s almost the entire street.  Photos of some of the items are available here.

There will be a lot of different items for sale including:

• 4 Poster Queen bed frame
• Solid mahogany bedroom set including double bed, mens dressers, womens dresser, two night stands, and mirror from Kling (Kling became Ethan Allen)
• Glass dining room table
• Glass coffee table
• Solid wood dining room table, chairs, and hutch
• Every day Pfalzcraft dish set of 6
• Silver China Set
• 13″ TV/VCR combo
• Movies
• Toys
• Tools
• Items for babies and kids

View Larger Map

1. Our first flight from ROC to JFK was delayed by about 2 hours. 
2. We had to get a new connecting flight to Orlando (well, we might have been able to make it they said but with the little one we opted to have a slight lay-over at JFK).
3. We entered that dump of an airport named JFK and rushed through a mass of sweating people (does that place even have AC?  it was at least 80 in there) to our next gate only to find a flight to Tampa.
4. We went back to the gate we started at.
5. We would have easily made our first connection and now our second connection was delayed.
6. Jet Blue provided almost no status updates while we waited in 80 degrees temps in that dump.
7. Shortly after boarding the pilot told us there was a 1 hour expected wait to get on the runway.
8. The first kiosk we tried for our rental care was broken.
9. There was no AC at the car rental booth.
10. Alamo charges $10 per DAY for a second driver.  They MUST be kidding.  There’s no way I’m going to pay $100 just so that both of us can drive the car.
11. After finishing at the kiosk I wait in line for a long time (again, no AC and I’m wearing jeans).  Cassie is now crying as it’s after midnight, very hot, and we’re all tired and luging around an insane amount of luggage.
12. The guy at the Alamo desk said there’s no way he could change the driver from me to Mary.  That’s bad.  Mary’s a better driver.  And give me a break, why can’t he change the stuff?  He said he’d have to make a brand new reservation.  BS.  I flipped out on him a bit sort of apologized and then took the rental as it was.
13. There were no mini-suvs as per our rental agreement.  They offered an upgrade to a gas guzzling car.  I wasn’t happy.  They offered a Prius.  I accepted.
14. We dug through a pile of car seats to find one the right size for Cassie.
15. The car seat was complicated, had poor instructions, it was hot and humid and we were outside (no AC appears to be a theme on this trip).  I struggled with that thing for more time than I will admit.  I finally got it in and…couldn’t start the car.
16. Alamo tried to start the car and couldn’t.  So we started moving all of our stuff to the next Prius on the lot.
17. I’d lost control by this point and Mary asked me to try to start the other car (even though Alamo had and showed me how to).  When I finally tried I couldn’t start it.  There’s no way they had two broken cars.  After choking bak my urges to completely destroy their entire fleet of vehicles I figured it out — YOU MUST HAVE THE BRAKE DEPRESSED TO START THE CAR.  Why of why do they do that?  No other car works like that (well, maybe if you consider clutch pedals in cars in the states).
18. By this point Cassie was screaming like I’d never heard her scream.  I had upset her, it was nearing two AM, it was HOT (there was AC in the car!).  We couldn’t find the correct way to leave the rental lot because they gave us a car that wasn’t exactly on their lot.
19. When we found our way out the exit booth person asked for the rental agreement.  We couldn’t find it.  I lost it again.  The nice woman took pity on me and reprinted the agreement using my drivers license.
20. After being awake for 22 hours I finally went to bed and Cassie had calmed down while we drove the rental to Donna’s.

I realize things could have been a lot worse.  We could have been stuck at an airport overnight.  We could have not had a rental car at all  Cassie could have been miserable on the plane.  By the way, Cassie was AWESOME in the plane.  When she wasn’t sleeping she was happy and peaceful.  She didn’t even let out a whine let alone a cry on the plane.  Still that was the worst 14 hours of travelling in my life so far, probably because I was so tired.

I’ve been running a lot in the last month and I thought I was invincible.  I should have been invinsible too.  You see I found a block floating in the sky that had a flashing question mark on it.  I jumped up and punched it and a star with a face came out.  I grabbed the star before it bounced away and then I was running super fast and nothing hurt.  Somehow that star wore off but I kept running super fast and super far.  My shins decided that they’d let me know that I wasn’t invincible.  The pain was enough to stop me in my tracks a few times on a 7 mile run.  I decided that I needed to back off, especially with the boilermaker coming in about a week.

I shouldn’t have gone on that run where I had the pain.  I knew that I needed rest but it was pouring rain outside!  You’d think that would keep me away but it had the opposite effect.  I didn’t want the high-noon runners club at work to think that I was wimping out because of a little rain.  Surely they wouldn’t believe that I didn’t run just because I needed to rest.  In a way I’m glad I went for the run because it reminded me how fun it is to run in the rain!  I felt like some sort of warrior running as I ran through the woods with rain pouring over my face.

This past weekend I skipped my long run and had a full four days with absolutely no running, limited weight lifting, and lots of RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) for my shins.  I also used good old vitamin I to help things along.

Today was supposed to be a 9 mile easy run.  I decided it would be a max of 7 miles as I tested out my shins.  When I headed out today I was pleasantly surprised that there was no pain!  My shins felt strange but they didn’t hurt.  Hopefully things will stay that way!

Today also happened to be 90 degrees out when I hit the canal path.  I really had no idea it was that hot out.  I thought it was about 80 because I hadn’t checked the weather before I left.  The water fountain located about 2.5 miles into the run was fantastic.  It was even better on the return leg of the out and back route.  In fact I drank from the spigot since it was easier to do and I wanted water on my head.

Not only did I not bring water but I also forgot to bring soap, shampoo, and deoderant.  I realized this before the run but I wasn’t about to let stinkage for the second half of the work day stop me.  I already skipped a run due to a stupid injury.  Neither soap nor shampoo nor deoderant shall stop this runner!  I’m hoping the rest of my training goes better than this!

My training plan is ambitious but I think it will be good.  I’m using it as a guide but not as law.  I will deviate from the plan as I already have.  Besides, there’s little chance that I’ll find the time or the desire to run 30-40 miles while on vacation.  Yeah, I’ll want to run but probably not that much.

Since it is now summer there’s plenty of roadkill. I saw what I think was an o’possum. At least it may have been one…some time ago. At this point it’s just a twisted mess of leathery furry grossness that has left a stain on the road. It’s not easy to stain asphalt! I also witnessed an alarming PRK (phantom road kill). PRKs are never pleasant but they are somewhat easy to deal with. Holding your breath while running isn’t fun but it’s necessary sometimes. What frightened me about this PRK was that I witnessed it running past the butcher shop.

As for living animals I saw a few cyclists, a bunch of walkers, and one runner. When I see runners I always wonder about them. Are they going for a long run? Do they run the same distance every day? Are they just starting their run or are they near the end or the middle? Are they thinking the same thing about me? Do I look creepy because I’m probably staring at them waiting for my opportunity to wave?

I should have stopped running after 13 miles but kept going. I kept going because I had a record mileage week and I was so close to getting a 50 mile week that I decided I had to do it regardless of what my body was telling me. To get to 50 miles I’d have to run just shy of 17 miles. I decided to shoot for 18 by adding the two mile loop and the three mile loop. I ran the two mile loop first because I don’t like it much. By the time I finished the two mile loop I decided that I wanted the run to be over sooner rather than later so I ran the two mile loop a second time bringing my total run to 17 miles and my weekly mileage to 50.4 miles and my monthly mileage to 186.5 miles. Both are records for me. I nearly ran as many miles this week as I did in the entire month of January!

I finished the run today in 2:20:56, an 8:18 pace. Consider that I raced yesterday I’m really happy with this time!

If I can keep this up until MCM this October I’ll be in really good shape. I wish MCM were sooner! I’m in much better shape than I’ve ever been in. I feel ready for a marathon right now but I’m going to have to wait until the end of October.