HP - Returning the Rental is Easier than Returning Home

Caleb and I made a little venture into The Hague to return our rental van on Wednesday.  This does not sound like much of a challenge.  But, allow me to elaborate.  Navigating the roads up to this point has been relatively smooth using our handy dandy English accented lady guiding us to the right and left in our van.  We knew that it would require additional assistance for us to even attempt getting around, so we decided to drive into the city center and purchase a Garmin before returning the rental van.  No sweat, we had been to Media Markt (like Best Buy) before, and found our way there pretty easily.  With Garmin in hand after a fairly extensive time spent in customer service while they updated the latest European maps and put the device in English, we headed out.  Driving to the rental return was a piece of cake with two GPS units guiding the way mostly in tandem.  When one deviated, we elected to go with Garmin to make sure it was up to date.

We pulled into Avis and returned the van.  Now to try our new handy dandy app called 9292 to guide us home without a car.  9292 is a sleek little tool that utilizes all the public transportation available to get you from point A to B.  I had pulled up the Avis location and entered our home address that morning so had no trepidation about finding our home 10 miles away.  We followed the little blue dot which was supposedly taking us to the nearest bus stop for Bus #43 straight to Wassenaar.  However, when the little blue dot aligned perfectly with the supposed bus stop, we found ourselves in the middle of a 4 lane road standing in the median.  This was quite clearly NOT the bus stop.  After laughing hysterically that we did not see any buses even in the area, we started asking around by flagging down cyclists going home from work.  We were right smack in the middle of rush hour, and everyone was in a hurry to get home.

Unfortunately, the first two people had no idea where the bus stop was.  But, on our third attempt to ask, the cyclist thought is was generally in a particular direction.  We quickly headed that way, made a U-turn and found it about 100 yards from where the blue dot on my app said it would be.

No worries, our Bus #43 came within about 3 minutes.  Now, we just had to remember how to use the train cards John had gotten for us and find out how to tell the driver when we wanted to get off the bus.  

We scanned our cards with a little help from the driver and then watched a few others and determined that the "stop" button was to be pushed to signal that you wanted to get off at the next stop.

Caleb did the honors right before we arrived to our stop, and we proceeded off the bus to loud calls of other passengers.  We clearly had done something incorrectly.  We stepped back onto the bus with quizzical looks.  A lady was pointing to the scanner which was just like what we had used when we got on the bus, and we remembered that John had instructed us to always scan at the end of our trip or we would be charged for the whole route.  Fumbling for the cards now securely packed back into my purse, we took what seemed like 5 minutes to get them scanned and back off the bus.

Lordy lordy....another new experience down.  I look forward to the time when I can start helping people rather than always receiving help.  But, for down, I am just so thankful that God is bringing people into our path to help us along the way.