Free Lunch?

We hadn't heard from our car rental company before we left for Hawaii, but when we only had two days left, we found out all the major companies' cars were reserved. What to do? 

We'd seen hucksters on the street corners touting $10 day car rentals, and we figured so what if we have to rent a wreck? Worth a try. That's how we met Kevin, who spent the next 20 minutes persuading us to sign up for a 90 minute "presentation" about a travel website in return for said $10 rental car. Yes there are new cars available today, he said, and from Thrifty, no less. Plus++++we were eligible for a $50.00 gift certificate to Top of Waikiki revolving restaurant (which we'd snuck into the day before and knew $50 would get us one meal, at least). Plus++++we could take home a CASE of chocolate macademia nuts (he'd evidently figured us for chocoholics, or nut nuts). Smelled like a time-share salesjob to me. Oh no, it was absolutely not a time-share, and the 90 minutes would start the minute we got there. Absolutely no commitment to buy anything or join anything. Nobody would check to see that we did have the qualifying income. Oh, Marylin wasn't a US citizen, then it would have to be under my name.

We figured the car alone was worth 90 minutes of our time, so signed up. Well, of course it was a time-share by some other name (Look, I've forgotten already!). I'd made Marylin promise to stop me if I squeezed her hand and seemed to be giving in to the sales pitch, which I did several times. The presentation was very entertaining, the sales reps were charming and friendly, but who wants to stay in 4 star resorts all the time? (I know, lots of people, but not us) and the deals kept getting sweeter and sweeter and more and more "affordable". Squeeze that hand! Of the dozen or so other people who were there at the same time, three or four couples purportedly signed on the dotted line. 

We finally escaped with our credit cards un-maxed, and went to the "prize desk" to claim our car. That's where we found out out that there were no compact cars left, but we could upgrade to a Jeep for $50 more and by the way said Jeep was waiting for us at the airport! We chose to trade our case of macademia nuts for the upgrade and persuaded them to give us a free 40 minute ride to the airport.

So 90minutes +++++ 3 hours later we were off to explore the non-Honolulu part of Oahu! p.s. We got pupus and happy hour drinks on the revolving restaurant gift certificate +++++ $20.