We had the chance to travel up to Port Townsend a week ago and visit a school friend of ours. The lure was that he was starring in a series of one-act plays put on as part of a local festival, and since neither Amanda nor I had ever seen him act, we decided that this was as good a chance as any. We called Enterprise Rent-A-Car and set up a reservation with them, then called our local office and asked them to pick us up at 7:45 Friday morning.

Then we called to confirm the day before, and the person who answered told us that they couldn’t pick us up at 7:45 Friday morning, but 8:00 was doable. Okay.

Amanda and I were up early, getting ready, when, at 7:40, we hear a knock on the door. You guessed it, they used the original time we had specified before whoever told us that it had to be 8AM stuck their nose into the whole situation. We had been anticipating an 8AM pickup, so our poor Enterprise representative had to wait outside while we finished getting ready — probably an additional 10 minutes.

Anyway, when we were ready, we stuck our head out the door, shook hands with the guy, and he showed us down to our truck.

Wait — our truck? The reservation was for a compact, but apparently Enterprise regards some trucks as compacts. This particular one was an orange Chevrolet Colorado four-door cab. Not really what I expected, but okay. I suspect that it was only a half-bed rather than a full-bed truck, which is probably what qualified it as a compact.

We made good time back to the local Enterprise office, where our representative asked us whether we wanted another car. I decided that a truck would be okay (I may never want to own one, but driving one should be interesting, right?), so we signed the paperwork and off we went. Since the truck only had an eighth of a tank of gas left, we ran to Safeway and refueled. I had forgotten that the price of gas keeps going upwards recently, so the refuel was a bit of sticker shock, but that’s okay. Plenty of gas and a good car is a good combination. We picked up our stuff at the apartment, then went off to the College for our staff meeting at 9AM.

When we left campus, we took Highway 101 north towards Port Angeles, then cut across Highway 20 to get to Port Townsend. We got there without much fanfare (though we got slightly lost in Port Townsend itself due to somewhat vague directions). We wandered around Port Townsend for a while, then went to dinner at a pizza place in town. Afterwards, we went to see the friend of ours in the plays — very good, and all quite entertaining.

Saturday, we wandered around downtown Port Townsend and peeked into a lot of little shops, then had lunch at The Public House — very good food. As a group, the three of us had the lamb burger, fish and chips, and pacific burger. We then went back to where we were staying until dinner, when our friend had to go to his Saturday night performance. That left Amanda and I once again wandering downtown looking for a place to eat. For lack of someplace cheap and/or not crowded, we ended up going back to The Public House, which had a fairly good live musician playing. Good dinner, too — Amanda and I had two plates of the chicken penne without tomatoes. Very rich cream sauce, though the portion size was a little on the low side for me. Still good.

We went back and watched Airplane! on DVD until I had to go running out the door to pick up the friend of ours at the theater, since I had offered earlier in the day. Bringing him home, Amanda and I went to bed.

We left at about 10AM the next morning. This was fairly uneventful, though the fact that I had to keep pulling over to let people pass and that I once had to speed up in order to avoid being rear ended, both times on 101, seems to me indicative of the modern driving habit. I routinely go the speed limit, but I still felt pressured to pull over on at least four different occasions.

Sad.

Anyway, we got back into town and stopped by the Blue Heron Bakery to see if they had anything that Amanda could use her gift certificate on. They didn’t, but at least we now know what selection they have. Returning the truck, we had driven about 210 miles round trip — not bad, considering that the first 501 miles of the trip were free of surcharges.