[slideshow]Prior to our recent trip to Barcelona Blonde and Brunette decided to line up some activities that would be both enjoyable to do and fun for our readers to hear about. This post is about one that did not fall into the “enjoyable to do” category so we hope it at least qualifies for the “fun to hear about” one.
Using Viator we booked the Barcelona Guided GPS Go-Car Tour. Blonde had chanced upon this opportunity one night after several glasses of wine and emailed it to Brunette for consideration. Brunette is supposed to be the sensible one – that’s why nature made her a brunette. But she unwisely gave her blessing and the excursion was booked.
This is one of those things like wanting to have sex with someone who’s hot but crazy too. The “hot” part wins out in the beginning and immediately afterwards (or during), when crazy appears, you wonder “what was I thinking?”. (In other words, we got screwed.)
We were doing the Go-Car tour at 9:00 a.m. hoping that the late-dining folks of Barcelona might still be snoozing at that hour instead of mowing us over in the Go-Car. Whether there was any merit to that thinking will never be known as we accidentally benefitted from the fact that it was also Catalonia’s National Day. More than a million people would be coming to town to celebrate. They mostly weren’t arriving until afternoon and everyone else was too smart to be out and about. Everyone else but us.
As is our custom we got lost and confused and had to engage in multiple pantomimes with perplexed would-be helpers as we tried to find the place. When we got there it’s a toss-up as to whose faces looked more surprised: theirs at seeing two women our ages there to rent a car or ours when we saw the little clownmobiles. Blonde, like a not very bright small child, was thrilled by the prospect of wearing a helmet decorated with pink feathers. Brunette began to arrange for our dead bodies to be scraped off the streets of Barcelona and shipped back to the States.
A mandatory video was shown to ensure our “safety”. Seriously?? We’re in an open-topped clownmobile two inches off the street being driven by a blonde in a pink-feathered helmet and you think we can be “safe“? The safety warnings might have been better directed to the pedestrians and drivers of Barcelona whom we were preparing to terrorize.
At the conclusion of the video, the rental place manchild rolled our “car” out to the alley, pushed it down to the street and showed Blonde how to start it up. It was really a scooter, not a car, and Blonde had never driven a scooter before and never will again. It took a series of failed hops and stalls to get the whole revving versus movement versus brakes thing somewhat figured out.
As we set off, the annoyingly chipper female voice that narrated the tour gave us our options and, in a rare moment of sound thinking, we chose the shortest trip. Brunette’s head spun around like that vomiting chick in The Exorcist as she looked for tour buses, trucks and other vehicles threatening to flatten us. Blonde, who has illusions of competency, was having a major illusion-checking experience as she lurched along with the comfort of a jagged piece of glass working its way through one’s colon.
Drivers in Barcelona are amazingly kind and good-humored or there would be no one alive to write this post now. If this escapade had been in Blonde’s hometown of Boston we would have had horns blaring at us, people cutting us off and been the targets of loud and imaginative profanity. The worst we got was a very minor beep from the horn of a car we did a “figure 8″ around at a stoplight. Guess they aren’t fans of figure skating G0-Cars in Barcelona.
The Go-Car spewed horrid fumes (worse than the night Brunette had that eggplant dish for dinner but that will be another post) and had a way of magnifying any bumps or blemishes on the road. Our helmets slid around on our heads and Blonde was on the verge of knuckle spasms from her death grip on the rev and brake handles.We began to suspect that the Go-Car company was secretly funded by business-boosting chiropractors.
Blonde also became quite testy, perhaps even verbally abusive, to the narrator. She had a cheesy sense of humor that was not appreciated and provided a range of options when we only wanted one that said ” do this to survive”.
Finally, queasy, coughing and immensely relieved we returned that little bitch of a car to the rental place along with our mumbling and unappreciative remarks. Blonde is no longer authorized to book “fun” trip activities.