How Do you Get 4 Elephants In A Mini?
Posted By Judith on 20th February 2019
Well, I’m sure we’re all familiar with that old chestnut. For those of you who aren’t the answer is ‘2 in the front and 2 in the back’. However, you might not be quite as familiar with this riddle. How do you get a large suitcase in the boot of a Mazda MX5 convertible? Any ideas? Well the short answer is, you don’t!
Here’s the thing. My Canadian penfriend of 50 years is visiting the UK in March and she’s coming to see me here in Binbrook before heading off to the south coast.
Everything was arranged, flights, trains, accommodation. I was to pick her up from Scunthorpe railway station. What could possibly go wrong?
It was early one morning, I was lying in bed thinking about getting up, when it hit me. MX5’s have a very small boot and no back seats, travelling half way round the world will require serious luggage. That’s what could go wrong.
We’ve had MX5’s for the last 25+ years and have got used to the small boot capacity, for us it’s just ‘normal’. I can get my weekly shop in and that’s really all that’s needed, but a suitcase?
After several emails including pictures of the suitcase and it’s dimensions, I went out with my measuring tape. I’d never really studied the boot in any detail before, but now I did it was obvious the case would not fit in. Not only is the boot small, but the opening that things have to get through first is even smaller and a ridiculous shape to boot. (Sorry couldn’t resist that!)
Needless to say there are no suitable bus routes between Scunthorpe and Binbrook, so there followed lots of phone calls to local taxi and private hire firms, car rental garages, also the railway station, to try and find a solution to the problem.
In the end it turned out that the cheapest and most satisfactory option would be to hire a car for the 2 days of her arrival and departure. So that’s what I decided to do.
And so yesterday morning I was in Louth doing just that. It went pretty well, except that they really should up date their website as several pieces of information were incorrect, not least of which was the cheapest car available. So instead of hiring a Ford KA for £34.95 plus VAT per day I’m getting a Ford Fiesta for £39.95 plus VAT.
I provided ID and my driving licence and expected to have to sign lots of forms, returning home with reams of paper laying out the rules for hiring, times of collection etc. No such thing. In fact all I got was a till receipt for my payment, you couldn’t tell if I’d hired a car or a bouncy castle!
Now things are sorted I can’t help but wonder what we would have done had I not had this ‘light bulb’ moment about the size of the boot. It doesn’t bear thinking about, we really dodged a bullet there.
I think there must have been some divine intervention at work.
