Sometimes life takes interesting, unexpected twists. And that’s why we ended up having dinner with people I never expected to see again in a town we never expected to visit again.

In an earlier item, I told about the incredible kindness and generosity the Langer family showed me 43 years ago during my first trip down under.

Well, thanks to some very helpful people in Esperance, the town in which they lived way back in 1971, and the miracle of Google, I was able to track down the entire family. I’ve been trading emails with daughter Tina (now known as Chrissy) for the last couple months.

As I mentioned, we need to return our rental car to Perth in order to avoid a $4200 one-way drop-off fee. That twist of fate took us back to Western Australia and very near to Kalgoorlie, the outback town in which the Langer sisters now live.

When Chrissy found out we were going to be in the area, she invited us to her house for dinner. I protested, saying that I should take them out to dinner and that it wasn’t right that a second generation of Langers should host me and feed me.

I don’t mind admitting that I was a little nervous as I knocked on her door. Even though Chrissy’s invitation was warm and welcoming, I feared we’d run out of things to talk about in an hour and that it would then get uncomfortably quiet. I also worried that Jamie would be bored to death listening to us talk about memories from 43 years ago (back about the time she was getting out of diapers).

Oh, my god, how wrong I was. It was a great night.

Chrissy and her husband Eddie hosted us at their beautiful home. We were joined by sister Wendy and her husband Tiny, who live right across the street. We laughed and told stories and relived memories and got to know each other for hours. And best of all, father Johnny Langer called in from his home in Perth. He’s now 88 years old and still sharp as a tack.

To tell the truth, I didn’t think either of the Langer sisters really remembered me, but they did. Chrissy said she remembered that I had long hair and a beard and looked like Jesus. (I must admit that I did look a bit Christ-like in those days.) That amused Eddie to no end and he kept referring to me as Jesus Jimmy.

On the drive back to our hotel Jamie said, “The whole evening was soooo comfortable. It felt like we’d known them forever.” Then she paid them the ultimate compliment: She said she wishes we could move to Australia so she could hang out with them all the time.

Jesus Jimmy officially blesses the idea.

NOTE: In the photo above, that’s Eddie, Wendy, Tiny, Chrissy, and Jesus Jimmy.

Excuse me while I vent. We love our rental car, but we hate our rental car company.

Despite the fact that I’m an admitted Trekkie and Captain Kirk is priceline.com’s advertising spokesman, I’ve never purchased anything through that website. Until, that is, I rented our Australian car.

At the time, the deal seemed too good to be true. In the end, it proved the validity of the old aphorism that says, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

I had noticed some fine print on the rental contract that said, “One-way drop-off fees may apply.” I interpreted “may apply” as meaning “probably won’t apply”. The rental car company interpreted it as “We will bend you over and violate you so badly that you’ll be thrilled to pay an exorbitant one-way drop-off fee just so we’ll stop.”

After we rented the car — just before we walked off into the parking lot with keys in hand — the rental car agent casually said, “Of course, since you’re picking this car up here in Perth and dropping it off in Sydney, there will be a one-way drop-off fee.”

“I saw that in the contract,” I said. “How much will it be?”

I have paid one-way drop-off fees here in Australia on earlier trips. Once it was $250. Another time, when we dropped it off in a really remote location, it was $500. So although I was prepared to pay a fee, I was totally unprepared when the agent did some quick calculations, looked up at me and said, “$4200.”

To repeat, four thousand two hundred freaking dollars.

I may have caused a scene in the terminal. I may have said some things that I regret. I may have uttered some words that embarrassed my wife in public. I may have insisted that the agent get his manager on the phone at her home so I could express myself to her, too.

Unfortunately, we had no choice. The company was inflexible and, unfortunately, so was our itinerary. After I cooled off, we decided to take the car now and hoped to sort out this insanity later.

Then, just as we were leaving the counter, the manager called back and asked to speak to me again. “Are you aware,” she said, “that it’s company policy that you return the car to us in 60 days so we can exchange it for another car?”

I freaked out again. We would be in Adelaide, 1800 miles away, in 60 days. The manager soothed me by saying, “Oh, that’s ok. You can exchange it at any of our offices. I’ll send you an email in 30 days to remind you and tell you now to do it.”

It was a delightful car, everything we could have wanted — brand new with almost no kilometers on the odometer. Scant compensation, I would say, but at least it was something. We drove it 15,000 kilometers around Western Australia, the Northern Territory and South Australia with no problems.

After 50 days, however, I realized I had heard nothing from the manager about exchanging the car in Adelaide, so I sent an email to customer relations asking how to do it. I immediately received an automated response that said, “Thank you for contacting customer relations. We’ll get back to you within ten days.”

Ten days? We’ve all received email responses from companies who say, “We’ll address your issue within 48 hours”, but ten days? OK, I thought, maybe that’s just the way things work in Australia. I’ll wait.

Ten days passed. Two weeks passed. I never heard back from anyone in customer relations, so I called their 800 number, which began a whole new series of lies and deceptions by the employees of this company.

For eight long weeks, I tried to find out how to exchange the car. I worked my way up to the head of customer relations and he flat out lied to me. I called the Perth office repeatedly and always got a recorded message that said, “No one is available to take your call. Please leave a message.” That was followed by another recorded message that said, “The mailbox is full. Please call back later.” I called the Adelaide airport office and got exactly the same recorded run-around.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the company charged the $4200 one-way drop-off fee to my credit card on November 11, almost three months before the car was due to be dropped off. And they didn’t just charge it once, they charged it twice. And then, just for good measure, they threw in another $250 charge. In other words, they charged almost $9000 in illegitimate charges on my credit card.

By the time I finally got them to refund the money, the refund was more than $700 short because the US dollar had gone up in value against the Aussie dollar between the times that the charges were made and when the refunds were applied. It took another series of phone calls and emails to get that additional money refunded.

In all, it took eight weeks of repeated calls to the lying head of customer relations. The Perth office flat out lied and said that they had returned my phone calls and emails. I’m now insisting on getting everything in writing from anyone I speak to at this company. So when I finally got the Perth office on the phone and demanded specific written instructions on how to return the car to Adelaide, they sent me specific written instructions on how to return the car to Perth.

With that, I gave up on expecting any help from these morons. We still didn’t know how to exchange the car, so Jamie and I left a little early on the day we were driving down to Adelaide for the cricket game and went to this company’s car return depot at the airport.

We explained our situation to the nice young woman behind the counter and she said, “I don’t understand why this has been such a problem for you. We exchange cars all the time.” Ten minutes later we were back on the road in a new car.

In the end, the only way for us to avoid a $4200 one-way drop-off fee is to return the car to Perth. If you look at our itinerary, we have about ten unscheduled days after we leave the Barossa on September 28. So now, instead of driving 1400 kilometers to Sydney as we had intended to do, we will be driving 2800 kilometers back to Perth, where we’ll spend a few days on the beach and then fly back across the country to Sydney.

Let me make an already-too-long story as short as I can. This is the most dishonest, incompetent rental car company on earth. Every time I tell this story to an Aussie, they say, “Oh, yeah, that company has a terrible reputation for making unauthorized charges and awful customer service.”

Now they tell me.

It was hotter than hell today — about 110 degrees. That, of course, made it the perfect time for Deb, our friend who owns Blonde Coffee, to invite us out on a hike at the Kaiserstuhl Conservation Park. She promised that we would see kangaroos and as far as we’re concerned you can never see too many kangaroos.

In the photo above, that’s Deb’s butt in the foreground and a kangaroo’s butt in the background.

The Park is just a few miles outside Angaston. The walk only took about an hour, but it was amazing how varied the landscape was. And despite the fact that kangaroos are smart enough to stay in the shade and rest when it’s this hot, we saw quite a few of them.

The place, you might say, was hoppin’. (Of course, people would groan and tell you that puns are the lowest form of humor if you did that, but what the hell.)

 

The photo above shows us with Ray and Polly, the first Aussies we were ever able to categorize as friends. We caught up with them for lunch in beautiful Henley Beach a few days ago. Despite our friendship, Ray and Polly are responsible for our creepiest moment ever in the land down under.

Back in 2000 we rented their beautifully-restored cottage in Tanunda, South Australia, just a few miles from Angaston.

Polly came in every week to clean the cottage and re-stock our refrigerator with local goodies. Being the gregarious sort I am, I invited her to lunch the following week and we discovered that she was a delightful person. We had such a good time that she reciprocated and asked us to a follow up lunch to which she would bring her husband.

Prior to that lunch we had a very weird experience at the cottage. The mosquitos were particularly bad that year, so one night I sprayed our bedroom before we went to bed and then closed the door so that any live mozzies would be outside the room. We climbed into bed, turned out the lights, and expected to go to sleep.

That’s when it got weird. Really weird.

A few minutes later, we both heard someone running up and down the hall outside our bedroom. Inside the house! The cottage had creaky hardwood floors and there was no doubt in either of our minds that we were hearing footsteps. It freaked us out because there was absolutely no question that someone was in the house. I got up and crept around the house, expecting to be whacked over the head by a burglar, but found that the doors were locked and no one was in the house.

A few days later we had lunch with Ray and Polly. After a bit of small talk I said, “Let me ask you a crazy question. Have any of your guests ever asked if the cottage is haunted?”

They looked back and forth at each other and acted a bit embarrassed.

Finally, Polly said, “Why do you ask?”

I told her about our experience and she said, “We think the cottage may be haunted. You’re the second tenants who’ve had a strange experience and we had a cleaning lady who quit because she said it was haunted.”

I asked to hear that story. Wouldn’t you?

“Well,” Polly said, “one week she made the bed in the third bedroom and then moved on to clean another room. When she went back into the third bedroom a few minutes later, the bedspread was messed up as if someone had been sitting on it. At first she thought her mind was playing tricks on her and that maybe she hadn’t actually made the bed. But when it happened again, she knew something strange was going on because she knew no one else was in the house.”

Polly had done a little detective work and found out that one of the house’s previous owners had died in that back bedroom many decades ago.

“The ghost doesn’t seem to be malevolent,” she said. “It just likes to play tricks.”

I’m not a big believer in the supernatural, but I thought this was kind of cool. It freaked Jamie out, but I began following the same ritual every night hoping that the ghost would come back and that I’d be able to catch a glimpse of it. Before retiring for the night, I went into the bedroom and sprayed for mosquitos, then shut the door tight before climbing into bed.

Despite my best efforts, the ghost never returned.

Damn it.

Look closely in the center of the photo and you’ll see me standing on the edge of the pier (in blue trunks), trying to get up my nerve to jump.

What form. What style. What grace. What a buffoon. All the judges held up their cards and gave me zeroes.

Here’s a video of my pathetic jetty jump (thanks to Mark, who has all the tech expertise I lack and who helped me embed the video):

Here we are with the Mustard kids – (back row) Jim, Jamie and Jaimee, (front row) Ebby and Lochie

Wallaroo, just another one of those crowded, congested Australia beaches.

Jim and Lochie comparing their lunch orders. Lochie’s hot dog was the size of a cricket bat. Jim’s ham and cheese croissant was the size of a cricket ball.

Our friend Lisa Mustard (isn’t that a great name?) has been on vacation with her family a couple hours up the coast in a little beach town called Wallaroo. She invited us to drive up and join them for the day.

Damn, we had fun.

Wallaroo has a series of piers of various heights that surround a large, fenced-in pool. It’s fenced in to keep the sharks from eating the kids. The water is so crystal clear that you can see right to the bottom.

What great kids. Lisa’s 15-year old daughter Jaimee is sweet as can be and beautiful (it must go with the name). Gorgeous 12-year old daughter Ebby made us both bracelets to welcome us to Wallaroo. And ten-year old son Lochie is a real character (naturally, we hit it off immediately).

Lochie and Ebby dared me to come with them and jump off the pier. Sister Jaimee rolled her eyes (as you would expect any older sister to do over any suggestion made by her younger siblings).

I talked real big and told Lochie and Ebby that I’d jump off the pier like a pro, but never really intended to do it. Then they got me out on the pier and I saw dozens of little kids and a few adults jumping in and realized it was too late to back out. Crap.

At one point I was lined up on the pier with Ebby on one side of me and Lochie on the other side and I said, “OK, let’s jump together.” Lochie looked at me and said, “No. You go first so we can make sure you really do it.”

Uh-oh. The kid was too damn smart for me.

I jumped. Didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. My last thought before going off was, “Well, being a quadraplegic might not be so bad. Jamie promised she’d get me a hot, young Swedish nanny.”

It was a second and a half of terror followed by 30 minutes of incredible exhilaration. The water was warm, the kids were fearless, and I wish I could do it every day.

Thanks for inviting us, Lisa.

Oh, my god, it’s been an incredible three months in Angaston and the Barossa Valley. It’s a very small town and word seemed to spread that we were in town, because it seemed like every time we met someone they said, “Oh, you must be the Americans.”

Everyone was so warm and so inviting and so friendly that we quickly felt at home.

Grant & Elizabeth and our hosts, Ken & Sue

The Blond girls – Kayla, Dana, Elsa and Alicia (all shown above) plus Belinda, Karla, Mel, Ashleigh, Georgia and, of course, owner Deb

The Mustards – (from left to right) Lochie, Daryl, Jaimee, Lisa, and Ebby. Oh, yeah, we’re in the photo, too.

The doctors – John and Margaret (John was Angaston’s doctor for almost 50 years. You gotta love a guy who says, “See that cemetery? Most of those people were my patients.”)

Plus all the people we don’t have photos of: Trevor, Lizzy and the horse. Jason and the crew at Soul. Diana the Yank and the crew at Rex. Scottie. John and Cassie. Carmel and Brian. Jo the Librarian. And all the others who made our three months in the Barossa so memorable.

Our sincere thanks to all the kind Aussies who took us in, invited us over for dinner and drinks, explained cricket to us, gave us directions, offered us advice, and so much more.

We’ll be back and we look forward to seeing you all again.

Can a village with a population of 1900 have a suburb? If it could, Moculta would be a suburb of Angaston. It’s the next village down the road. In fact, it’s really more wide spot in the road than village. It’s also where our friend Deb, the owner of Blond Coffee, lives.

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I’m far more into classic rock than classical music. And Jamie just lumps them both into a category generally known as “old music written long before I was born.”

Nevertheless, we decided to get a little culture by attending a performance of the Chamber Philharmonia Cologne at the Light Pass Lutheran Church. They performed various works by Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

One cavaet: The photo accompanying this post is not the church where the concert was held. It’s another Lutheran Church located just across the street. But this one is much prettier than the one in which the performance was held and in the spirit of our complete superficiality, we decided that beauty was much more important than truth.

Our goddaughter Stella is fifteen today. We can’t figure out where all the time has gone.

Here’s one of my favorite Stella stories:

I accompanied her to pre-school one day. This particular school had what they called Circle Time. All the kids sat around in a big circle first thing in the morning and the headmaster welcomed them to school and made a few announcements and then a guitar-playing music teacher led them in a few songs. It ended with the headmaster asking the students to introduce any visitors.

Stella was sitting on my lap and when her turn came around she wasn’t quite sure how to introduce me because, quite honestly, I don’t think she really understood exactly what our relationship was.

“This is Jim,” the gorgeous little girl said. “He’s my grandfa … he’s he’s my godfa … he’s my unc … (long pause) … he’s my friend.”

Indeed, Stella, I am all of those things.

She has grown into an absolutely amazing young woman. She’s beautiful and brilliant (although her father always reminds me to say brilliant and beautiful). She’s a chef. A remarkable jazz pianist. A former food blogger. A current fashion blogger. A TV star (well, ok, she was on one TV show, but that’s enough for a grandfa … godfa … unc … friend to consider her a TV star). And she has a heart of gold.

Happy birthday, Stella. Jamie and I love you.

UPDATE: It’s already January 23 here in the land down under, so Jamie and I are already celebrating your birthday.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Big day for Stella. Not only did she turn 15, but she and her fashion blog were featured on TeenVogue. Congrats, kid!

We went to another outdoor movie out at the beautiful Jacobs Creek winery the other night. It had been about 110 degrees during the day and we thought it might be a beautiful night to enjoy the warm evening breezes under the stars.

We were wrong.

About 30 minutes before the movie was scheduled to start, those warm evening breezes suddenly turned into gale force winds. We were pelted with branches and bark flying off the towering eucalptyus trees that surrounded the lawn area. Then the winds began lifting the outdoor screen off the ground. Several workers ran out and attempted to secure it to the ground, but a few minutes later they announced that the movie had been cancelled because of the dangerous wind conditions.

We drove home and went straight to bed. A few minutes later we were awakened by a loud pounding on the door and when I opened it, Scottie, our next door neighbor announced that an out of control bush fire just over the hill was heading toward Angaston and that the whole town might have to be evacuated. He told us to be ready to leave if necessary. He took me outside to look at the night sky, which was glowing red.

We packed all our bags just in case. Around midnight, the winds suddenly stopped. I mean flat out stopped. It was eerie that they had been so strong one minute, then absolutely still the next minute.

Angaston was safe, but just over the hill the Eden Valley was devasted. I think 50,000 acres were burned, a dozen houses were lost and many, many domestic and wild animals were lost. One of our friends had to evacuate and she didn’t know for a day or two if she still had a house to go home to. Luckily, it had been spared.

Funny, isn’t it, that Jamie and I spent most of our lives in wildfire prone Southern California, yet neither of us has ever come closer to one than here in the Barossa.