Booking a hire car should not be this tricky – but here I am, £1200 lighter with as much of a car hired as I did a week ago (none, by the way…). The reason for this, it appears, is that attempting to book a car rental for a drive across america, from an american car rental company, is madness.

After spending a good 25 minutes on the phone to someone in the states, they come to the conclusion that it is just not possible for me to be able to make the rental via them – and that the best thing to do is call my UK office. Fine, I thought – any excuse to get off the phone at £1.06 per minute. The following morning I get woken up to a charming voicemail from my bank telling me that there has been suspicious behaviour on my account. Hmm. Strange that.

It turns out that the US Avis office had attempted four, 4!, times to process the account and in the end had given up and cancelled all references to my booking. However, what they hadn’t noticed is that one of those times had actually been successful – charging me £1200, thank you very much.

This is very much a “to be continued” as tonight will involve me calling Avis in America to figure out what exactly has happened to all the money. But at this point, it seems we’re currently doing the road-trip sans-car, which I will admit is a pretty tricky thing to do.