Europe Day 21 – Never goto Hollywood in Sicily

That’s right, never goto Hollywood in Sicily. There’s a place that rents motorcycles and cars about 100 meters from the train station called “Hollywood.” Let me tell you why I spurn them so.

When they rented the scooters to us they accidentally mixed up the keys to the scooters. Now, this shouldn’t be a big deal right? Wrong. Because I was driving (and subsequently crashed), not the scooter I rented but, the scooter that Lewis rented we ran into problems.

I knew that I would have to pay the insurance deductible, which was like 250 euros (336 US). I was happy to pay that, I mean the accident was my fault and all; it was only right. But when the guy at Hollywood added up Lewis’s bill it was 290 euros (40 euro extra for being late). We realized what had happened and I went to pay for Lewis.

This is when Hollywood rentals earned my hate.

Rather than simply taking my credit card to pay for “Lewis’ Bike” they said that he had to pay with his card, or in cash. We told them that that was just silly because it was really my accident and it wasn’t our fault that the person helping us mixed up the keys. They refused. They told Lewis to just pay and have me reimburse him later.

We passed, and I’m not exaggerating 3 hours there trying to get them to just let us pay for the bikes that each of us were driving and they refused. It was ridiculous. I finally, bleeding, limping and very tired walked to three different ATMs. All of these ATMs had been blown up, or smashed in (thanks Italy). I went back to Hollywood where they were holding Gary and Lewis hostage and one of their guys “escorted me” to a working ATM farther away.

We got an overnight train to Rome and tried to sleep the anger off.