And then we hopped to the second island, the Big Island or Hawai’i itself, where I had dreamed of returning after two fantastic visits in 2014 and 2016. Happy to leave the ‘tiny house’ behind and really looking forward to our next Airbnb, where I had stayed before and which genuinely was paradise, I started to really relax once we took to the air in Honolulu and especially when we touched down in Kailua-Kona airport. The airport is small and cute, and we were soon on our way to the rental car agency. What can go wrong, right?

And you think you have things covered when you have six bank cards

This time we had reserved a car at Avis, and I was just waiting for Søren to get done with the paperwork, when the machine did not accept his credit card for the deposit. Ah, I said with a smile to the agent, don’t worry, we have five more cards (you may remember that I have said this before, when we were trying to buy Birk’s sport school uniform. Apparently, I am an optimist at heart). And what do you know, the machine said ‘no’ to all Søren’s cards... And mine were not possible anyway since we don’t share a last name and the reservation was in his name. And we were like, what?!?

The pitfall of the credit / debit card

What we learned was that Avis has very strict guidelines for debit cards, and the problem was that our credit cards also double as debit cards – yet the machine saw the card only as a debit card (normally you can just select whether you want to use the card as debit card or as credit card). With debit cards, they do a check to make sure there is enough money on the card for the deposit – but they could not do that either since our cards were not American. So, what then?!??

Tipping the competition

Happily, the agent was really helpful – he suggested we try to rent a car with one of the other agencies. We had successfully rented at Thrifty and Dollar in New Zealand and Australia, and happily it turned out they did have available cars at reasonable prices (phew, for a moment I was worried everything was sold out and you really don’t want to do the US by public transportation – believe me, I tried). He even suggested we still book online because that saves a bit of money compared to going to the counter. So we sat on the bench outside of Avis and tried to get online. That didn’t work either – there was no WiFi, Søren didn’t have any data on his phone in the US anymore, and I had only very little connectivity. After another frustrating twenty minutes we gave up and just marched to the Thrifty agency across the road, where we got in just before 15 other people (phew again) and got a car. Yes, a bit more expensive than our original reservation, but it was still reasonable, and most importantly, it was a car! It even was a Jeep, though Søren was a bit disappointed it wasn’t the type he wanted to try out.

Paradise at last

And then the relaxation could start! We were quite exhausted from all that, so we just drove to a nice restaurant I had found on the coast, and had a wonderful lunch there. I really enjoyed the three types of poke that I got, artfully arranged on half a bamboo stick. And it was sunny, there were palm trees, and turtles swimming around in the clear blue waters. That’s more like it!