I don’t, but I’ve seen seatmates crack open a mini-bottle of Irish cream to add to their coffee. If you’re not caught you’re not a thief, as my grandfather used to say.
The reality is, I doubt anyone cares, they likely want you to purchase their overpriced drinks and to make sure you don’t get loaded in flight.
I have a feeling your grandfather had a lot of sayings!
He did! He was our family chef and babysitter. My sister and I got to hear a lot of them… every time we got in trouble we did.
And we were getting in trouble a lot. ![]()
Agree. I always travel with my own food. And water that I get after security.
The airlines serve junk, and it’s over priced at that. I fully agree with that!!
It is known that crashes are more common in rental cars than one’s own car, because of unfamiliarity with the car, area, and driving laws and patterns. So exercise caution if the trip requires using a rental car.
Many years ago, an older relative managed to total not one, but TWO rental cars during one trip abroad. His wife’s story, told after the fact, was side-splittingly hysterical. They weren’t in the car for the second accident – he’d failed to set the parking brake properly, and their car then totaled another car after a rapid descent down a steep hill. But the best part of the story was his righteous anger at the rental agency for refusing him a third car!
But I am increasingly less happy renting cars abroad. DH likes to drive, but I find the combination of often hard to read signage (different alphabets, etc), lack of familiarity with local customs, and then simply navigating in an unfamiliar place to be stressful.
One thing that seems to be common among drivers in the US is not using the parking brake at all. Not sure why this is a common habit*, but it can contribute to parked cars rolling away, both at home and while traveling.
*And it was common long before automatic electronic parking brakes became common.
Unfamiliar rental cars can have a very confusing parking break system. A button? A lever? Should it be pushed? Or pulled? And where is it? So many people just give up.
And don’t get me started on the improper parking on a hill.
We often go for a walk on a hilly street and for fun count curbside parked cars with wheels turned in the wrong direction. About 30% park wrong.
We rented a manual transmission car when in Italy a couple weeks ago. It’s cheaper and both dh and I know how to drive stick shifts (dh’s current car is a stick shift).
We stopped in a coastal town for lunch, super conscious of avoiding driving into a ZTL (limited traffic zone/heavy fines). Dh saw a large open spot on the street and quickly swung over, pulling in forward. He then needed to back up to straighten up and get closer to the curb. The problem? He can’t get the car into reverse. Our car had been backed into the spot at the rental office, so he hadn’t needed to reverse. Anyway, he keeps moving the gear shift to reverse, but the car keeps drifting forward toward the car in front of us, whose occupants were standing on the sidewalk. Dh is freaking out he’s going to hit their car. I get out of the car, while an Italian guy is standing in the door of a cafe watching us, amused. The couple from the car in front of us, who spoke English, are trying to help, perplexed at first why we rented a stick shift.
At this point, dh is hollering at me to ask the Italian guy, who does not speak English, for help. 30 years ago when I studied in Italy, I could speak Italian reasonably well, but um, that was 30 yrs ago! In the heat of the moment, words are not coming to me! Long story short, after googling it, there was some sort of ring around the gear shift that you needed to lift up while placing the gear shift into reverse. As soon as he did that, it worked! We had a good laugh!
The other funny thing was that the car’s electronics had been set to Dutch, so all the screens in the car were in Dutch. We thought it was German at first. We had the damndest time trying to figure out how to switch to English!
Note to self (well, I would not have left the rental lot w/o doing so, so I blame dh
) - figure out the car BEFORE getting on the road!
Manual transmissions in cars tend to have consistent ergonomics, but reverse is the main exception, since it can be in different places around the H pattern, and the lockout can differ (pull up the collar, push down, etc.).
Automatic transmission controls seem to be a place where car companies have been getting creative, not always in obvious ways.
This really confused DH in a recent rental of a Chevy Equinox. Twist this for reverse, push this for park. It was like having a bop-it for a gear shift.
In the future use Google Translate to communicate. When I ended up at a Japanese emergency room, I communicated with the doctors and nurses via the translator. I recently did that at a remote Italian town too.
Just another good usage of phone, you can use the Google app, turn on the camera on the app, point it to anything you want to find out what it is. Of course it would show you where you could buy the object.
When I travel with D1’s family in Europe, we usually do rent a car. We use google map for directions and it’s in English, so it tells you exactly when and where to turn. Even with a round about, it would tell you which turn to exit.
We’ve been renting cars in Europe for decades - H does the driving, I do the navigating. We still bring printed directions if we know we are going to be traveling way off the beaten path. We’ve lost our GPS signal a couple of times in very rural places and it would have been quite difficult to continue as we didn’t get the signal back for a while. In Iceland we actually rented a car with its own booster but still had some problems.
We don’t love driving in big European cities though so we typical rent the car on our last city day and then return it as soon was we get to the final city destination.
H and I have gotten pretty good at switching car nav systems to English. We also use waze or google or Apple Maps as needed, sometimes two methods to ensure we’re going the right way. I can translate French or German signs, but somehow we end up getting totally lost at least once on each trip.
On our trip last fall, we missed a connection and ended up on Icelandic Air. Never again. We had premium plus or whatever on delta, but ended up in economy on IA and had to buy our own (lousy) food and drink on the 9 hour flight home.
My dream flight was first class on Emirates with the best champagne ever, and honestly good food.
A friend was a pilot for American and was stationed in Greece when he was newly on the job. He said he was sure American paid more in rental car damages than in salaries while they were there. Not just them, but all of their friends too. Sure they could land a big plane but couldn’t drive down a steep hill.
We always rent a manual transmission in Europe. My husband is the driver and I’m the navigator. He also struggled with getting the car in reverse. He struggles with that in most rental cars. We rented a car in France a number of years ago when cars still came with a GPS. The GPS was set in German. We figured it out before we left the rental lot. The agent couldn’t figure it out and ended up giving us a portable unit. That same trip we needed gas and the only gas station on the road we were on did not have an attendant. We couldn’t figure out what gas we were supposed to use. Luckily someone came and told us which was the diesel. We would have used the wrong one.
So back to the topic of airline travel, whatever the new digital system they are implementing in Portugal and other EU countries for passport control (the EES), they have clearly not worked out the bugs.
Having driven manual for most of my life, I had no hesitation regarding renting a manual car in Martinique. D was in study abroad, and we were touring that very hilly Island! The first day I parked on a hill, and needed to back up to exit that parking spot. I could not find the reverse and the clutch point for the life of me. Someone hear me roaring the engine in my numerous tries when trying to exit the space, came over and got the car out of the spot. I was never so scared or thankful!
Other D’s sig other once put diesel in a petrol car in France, or vice versa. Somehow they found someone to drain the fuel tank before it ruined something.