Just the two of us. On the road. In a Jaguar. Romantic and stylish. Nothing can go wrong… Until the stupid thing runs out of battery because it’s electric and there was not a single charging point for the last 150 km.
Suddenly from feeling romantic and stylish, we turn to feeling stupid and annoyed. We are stuck on a highway in the middle of a forest. It is a dark day and it’s raining. I can’t feel my feet from cold because we couldn’t turn on the heating to save up the battery.
But the battery is only enough for 30 km… And there is no one to help us. Other drivers don’t just carry around electricity generators. It feels pretty helpless.
We call the salon where we rented the car from. There my friend bought a bunch of insurances, road assistance and other support so we hope they can do something. They ask us all sorts of questions, propose that we should have charged it beforehand but they are not prepared or equipped to help us.
We call the emergency number in one of the insurances but the number doesn’t exist. We press the SOS button in our Jaguar car and in five languages it tells us that the number we are calling is not in use. Then it makes ten rounds of repetition of the same message.
It is still raining and getting colder. Something is wrong with the battery saving mode of the car because it keeps losing the precious charge even when it is stationary. We have to decide what to do and we have to do it fast before the battery is completely drained.
The car’s navigation has suggestions of the nearest charging points. We have tried it before and three times out four the information is not accurate. But we have to try. We have no choice. The nearest point on the map is a Mercedes dealership lost in the outskirts of Belgian Luxembourg. It is 20 km away… We hope we can make it.
When we arrive there it is still closed. So we wait. Out in the rain. My fingers can barely move from the cold. In the meantime, people from our renting salon send us the address of the “closest” charging location: which is over a hundred km away from us. Very helpful and timely. My friend just says “They could work for me”. It is a catchy phrase he acquired recently because of how unprofessional his employees are.
Finally, they open the door. But just as we feared - they cannot help us. They don’t have the right type of charger. Luckily, the receptionist is very sympathetic to our situation. She looks up the nearest Jaguar dealership calls them up and makes sure that we can charge there. But the dealership is another 35 km away and we only have 10 left. Desperate we look at her for other ideas. So she finds a parking lot with a charger just 5 km away. And we are back on the road.
The parking lot just like everything else around there is empty and deserted. We find the plug and pray it’s the right type. Once it’s in, it shows us the estimated time till the full charge: 22 hours… Desperation and helplessness is what we feel. There are no cafes in the radius of two km from where we are. So we walk around the nearest store looking for warm socks and gloves while the car is charging.
Surprisingly enough, being two people on the road in this miserable situation, we have not got into a fight or blamed each other for anything. We are in it together and we are trying to fix it.
An hour later we go back to the car to see how far we can get now. It looks as if we can make it to the Jaguar salon the receptionist found for us. So we get back on the road. And having almost drained the battery, we finally get there. We try to park in an e-car spot but it is occupied by a diesel Jaguar. My friend is at the end of his patience so it is challenging to stop him from just smashing into that car from behind. Looks like with draining of the battery we are draining our own common sense and positive outlook.
He goes into the salon to find whose car it is an get them to move it. Turns out it is the owner of the salon who parked in the “wrong” spot. Fortunately, my friend is pretty good at changing his tune and negotiating. So we get our car plugged into a proper semi-fast charger inside of the garage. In the meantime, we are offered all the conveniences of Jaguar clients and spent the next three hours in a little waiting area inside. With nice chairs, coffee, tea, and wifi, looking over tens of brand new Jaguars which anyway have lost all their value in our eyes.
It might seem like it’s all better now. But in reality we left Luxembourg at 11 in the morning, it’s already 6 pm and we are just 50 km away from it because of all the detours. So we still have to travel over four hours to get home. That only means one thing - we will need to charge the car again…
We continue our journey. Tired and cold. The GPS signal is continuously disappearing. It’s getting late and dark. With maps reloading all the time and my friend losing his concentration we take wrong exits three times in a row. Finally, we are almost out of battery again and we just missed the exit to the closest charging station…
That’s it. We are too tired to drive. I make a call to stay in that city overnight and charge the car at the hotel parking. We book a room, get to the hotel, park our car and go up to have dinner.
In the warmth of the room with a tea in our hands, we try to make sense of what happened. We recall all the strange details of the trip. But something is not adding up. It is as if we are not supposed to come back to our city today. With roads disappearing from the map, it is like something is going out of its way to stop us from returning. No rational explanation comes to mind. So we just go to sleep and hope the morning will bring clarity.
Next day we wake up early, have breakfast and get back on the road. Our goal is to make it half the way and get to the fast-charging point. The sun is shining. It’s warm and cheerful outside. We wonder how can it be so different from the reality of yesterday.
Chatting, with great speed and comfort we get to our stop. We plug in the car. The estimated charging time is one hour. Everything is going according to our plan. We look around and watch a bus full of students heading to a carnival take a pit stop. With cheerful music coming from loudspeakers, all dressed in party suits they dance.
The car is charged. We are back on the road for the last stretch. In a couple of hours without further changes, we finally make it home.
But deep inside we are still wondering what happened yesterday: have we been lost between dimensions?
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