Last weekend, I met my friend Jo or a coffee overlooking the old Opera house in Frankfurt – one of my favorite spots in the city because it feels so European.

It was raining, we were lamenting that we had been in Frankfurt two weekends in a row, and we needed to lift our spirits. So we decided a trip to IKEA was in order.

This morning I got up and met Jo at the Book-n-drive car that I had booked online.

Book-n-drive is a service here where you can “rent” a car for a few hours. Most cities have something similar for those of us living downtown without a car.

So we found our car, opened it with our member card, got the key out of the glove compartment, and got ready to take off.

It just so happened to be an electric car, so we had to unplug it.

Well we tried and we tried and we could not pull that plug out.

We tried to read the manual, which was in German.

We looked up Youtube videos.

We pulled again.

Finally we called customer service and tried to explain to the German operator that we couldn’t unplug the car. She kept telling me, “First, you have to unplug the car.” Then we got disconnected.

We were pressing every button and pulling on everything that could be pulled.

Finally, after an hour of trying, we got a call back from customer service, who instructed us to open the car with the key (since we had opened car with our member card, we never actually used the key to open it).

Luckily, that did the trick (keep that tip in your back pocket if you ever need it).

From there, it was smooth sailing to IKEA.

It felt so great to drive on the open road and break free from the confines of the train (since Jo doesn’t have his license, I was behind the wheel)!

We lucked out on parking spots and even scored some pretty great stuff from IKEA.

Now, the home refresher project has started…and I’m adding redecorating to my list of winter mood boosting tips.