One of the chores I had to do before I left in October was to find a place to store my car. I found cheap storage in a pallet making factory on Cleveland’s East side. Figuring out how to pick it up weighed heavy on my mind the final few days of my trip. For some reason it was pretty cheap to fly out of Cleveland but the cost to fly into it was now costing several hundred dollars more. Flying into Toronto, 300 miles away was hundreds less. I chose Toronto via a Philadelphia layover.
After a nice visit in London, I took the metro system all the way to Heathrow. Expensive but it really convenient. I had the idea that I would just rent a car and drive back to Cleveland. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I thought about grabbing my luggage and bail on the final leg to Toronto. Drive to Cleveland from there. Save the border crossing. Luckily, the luggage got checked all the way to Toronto because that was as stupid of an idea as I could have had. It would have meant driving the length of the Pennsylvania turnpike in the middle of the night on jetlag. A miserable drive under the best of conditions.
This was right as the Covid was starting to show up outside of China but countries hadn’t started locking down. Lucky timing on my part. I was stuck in the passport control line for 3 hours. and in the end they just said Hi. No temperature check or countries visited questions, nothing. They do have wifi in the the customs hall so I was able to figure out how to get to Cleveland. Being tired, I thought that I could would just get the Greyhound bus. Until I found out that I would have had to go to the Toronto Bus Station in the middle of the night. Reviews of the station were not kind. Then I would have had to change in Buffalo for another few hours. Again, reviews left room for improvement. I have also been at a city bus station on a cold winter night. Not good memories.
I went with a car rental and headed out. The late night border crossing at Niagara Falls was quick and easy. I avoided the nice fast interstate highway because I knew I was going to start getting tired and would be needing a place to pull off soon. The upstate New York lake affect snow started falling pretty hard, mixed with my weariness, I pulled my into a strip mall parking lot and took a 20 minute nap. Had a bucket of gas station coffee and started driving again. A couple of miles later, the dreaded blue lights flashed in the rear view mirror.
The small town policeman was very nice as I gave him my paperwork. I think he was more impressed with my passport stamps than my ability to drive 50 in a 30 in a snow storm. He let me head on my way with a warning.
Daylight broke just as I hit Cleveland’s rush hour. My car was parked on the east side so it didn’t impact me too much. I headed right to the parking lot and waited for a couple of hours for someone to show up and let me into the warehouse.
Somehow, I didn’t lose my only car key during the trip. Didn’t really matter though, because the battery was dead, dead, dead. The locks are electronic so they were staying locked. I had to borrow the warehouse manager’s phone to call the auto club because I only had the replacement phone with the Nepal SIM Card. As is the case with cold snowy days, all my Auto Club co-members were calling in too.
About 3 hours later, the tow truck driver arrived and luckily had a battery on a cart that he had to roll deep into the warehouse. Because the door was locked, I couldn’t pop the hood to get to the battery. He had to jimmy the door lock first. With the charger hooked up, the car started right up. I had to let it run about 20 minutes to charge the battery up and finally drive my car out of the warehouse.
I drove around town for a bit to charge up the battery more before finally parking it near the metro station. Then I walked back to the warehouse to finally get the rental car to the drop off location downtown. That was easy but then I had to walk across town to the nearest metro station for the ride back to my car. About 36 hours after I left London, I got back to the car, crossed my fingers as I pushed the ignition button. It worked and an hour later, I pulled into the driveway and the trip was over.
