Monday, August 18, 2008

Zippity Doo Da Zippity Yay…

Sunday I drove down to Northern Virginia to see a dear friend who was visiting from Arizona. But this is the end of the story…let me start at the beginning.

As mentioned before, I am not a city girl. I am currently car-less and therefore getting anywhere outside of the city has proven to be quite the challenge. Luckily we have two carshare programs in my city. I chose Zip Car. We had a shaky start but I think we will be ok.

Signing up was a breeze. The customer service is fantastic. That alone, for me, is worth every penny. It’s hard to find good customer service these days! Verizon? Sometimes. Wells Fargo? Forget about it.

I signed up online, swung by my local Zip Office, picked up my Zip Card and reserved myself a Mini to zip me around town and down to VA on Sunday. Taking the car down to VA was a bit of an extravagance but I received a rebate so I did not feel all that bad. For in-town errands though, the Zip Car is quite nice.

Did you know that you can start the Mini with the push of a button? Like the way you start your computer? Or TV? Uh huh. There’s this round key fob thing that you push in and then as you press on the brakes you hit the Start button. And the Mini fires up.

I’m seriously showing my age here but I had a very hard time getting the car to start. I felt very old. And at 7 am on a Sunday, it’s not the best feeling. Luckily all I had to do was ring up the good folks at Zip Car and they talked me through it. I was on the road soon enough.

The Mini is a fun car. I had an automatic but it ran like a manual as the ride was a bit jerky. I’m not a fan of manual so that was lost on me but for all you guys who are into that, check out the Mini!

And if you need to zip around town to run errands, check out Zip Car!

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