Column: Ah, the joys of car ownership (and the occasional rental)

Fresh from my adventure of driving a small red rental car to Vermont, I found that my newest ride was—an extended-cab pickup truck.

My husband, Paul, and I share a vehicle, so when one of us goes out of town for more than a day, we rent a second vehicle. This time, we both were at home, but our Toyota Prius was going to be in the shop for two or three days.

Paul had gone to return recyclables at a local liquor store/redemption center. This place has a narrow, cramped parking lot. A few years ago, when we still owned two vehicles, our Toyota Rav4, was rear-ended while parked. This time, it happened to the Prius.

Returning from the redemption side of the building, Paul saw an elderly man backing into our car. The hatchback was badly dented, and a section of the body over the right rear tire was bashed in.

Paul shouted to the driver, who finally stopped. He tried to tell Paul the damage was old, but finally gave in and relinquished his information.

We couldn’t get a body shop appointment for several weeks, so I was back at my job as a school librarian when Paul finally brought the car in and waited for a ride to the car rental agency.\

He called me up later in the morning. “I’m not too happy,” he said.

“Why?”

“They gave us a truck.”

“A truck? I requested a compact!”

“They said this was the smallest vehicle they had.”

What’s bigger than a truck? All I could think of was a cargo van.

There’s a hilarious scene in the “Seinfeld” series involving rental cars. Jerry is at the desk of the agency.

Agent: I'm sorry, we have no mid-size available at the moment.
Jerry: I don't understand, I made a reservation, do you have my reservation?
Agent: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of cars.
Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
Agent: I know why we have reservations.
Jerry: I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a car. See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to *hold* the reservation and that's really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.
The agent eventually offers him a compact.
Jerry: Yeah, you better give me the insurance, because I am gonna beat the hell out of this car.

That’s kind of like how I felt—though I was afraid the truck was going to beat the heck out of me.

Paul came to pick me up midday so I could go to another school. He was driving a black Nissan Frontier that sat high off the ground. I was wearing a skirt. I grasped the steering wheel and hoisted myself up, hoping no one (besides my husband) was looking. Later, I realized there were interior handles for short-legged people like me to get aboard. How kind.

How in the world was I going to drive this thing, I thought. It turned out that driving it was almost a pleasure. I rather enjoyed being high up. I felt that the truck commanded a certain level of respect that the Prius could never hope to attain. OK, granola-crunching, hippie-hippie types admire hybrids, but I’m talking about the kind of presence that deters tailgaters. The big black extended cab had a “don’t mess with  me” attitude.

I mentioned this theory to a friend who is even shorter than me. She immediately said, “I respect trucks when I’m on the road!”

There were two big drawbacks to the truck, however. We have had roadwork going on all summer near our home. Most recently, we were unable to get in through the west end of our driveway (which is L-shaped and has entrances on two streets) because, well, that end of the driveway was essentially gone. (The road crew has since rebuilt it.) Anyway, the west end of the driveway is much wider than the south end. Paul instructed me to park the truck on the street until he could get it into the south end of the driveway. But even he had a hard time.

I also had difficulty parking the truck at work and the supermarket. It wouldn’t fit into a space no matter how hard I tried. The tail end of the bed hung over the next parking space.

The spaces in one of the schools I visit are so narrow that I had to troll around the parking lot for several minutes in order to find a spot where I had enough clearance to get in.

Friends and colleagues joked with me about my latest vehicle, knowing I am definitely not a truck type of gal. One coworker asked me if I was going to buy a truck now.

“I did like driving it,” I said. “But it was too big.”

He and another colleague laughed. “That truck was a mid-size,” they exclaimed.

Really? Mid-size?

I’m glad I didn’t know that while I was driving it and feeling like I was queen of the road.