What sort of negative anecdotes have you heard? I'm not really sure what could go wrong with this situation. The only thing I can think of would be either being unable to return a car to another location or being surprised by the drop fee, both of which can be avoided by ensuring everything is set up in advance.

The closest I've come was during a rental out of Thrifty CLT. After a week of train and road travel through twelve states, I was visiting a friend in MCO. My flight back home was out of CLT at noon the next day, and so I was faced with a long overnight drive to return the car and catch my flight. I was feeling weary, so I checked into the option of dropping the car off at MCO and booking a one-way flight to CLT.

The drop fee was, as I recall, a relatively reasonable $150, and the one-way flight was about the same (maybe a bit less). However, I would have saved a day's rental charges (~$120--I had taken the full coverage package plus a GPS and the underage fee) and about $70 in gas, meaning my total out of pocket expense would have been only an extra $100 or so--worth it for a good night's sleep, right?

Well, I decided that $100 is $100 and I'd better save it, plus I was (drowsily and deliriously?) under the impression I might be able to take a different route back through Atlanta and see a few things on the way back north, so around midnight, I said good-byes to my friend in MCO and headed out. The GPS said I had about 8 hours of driving, and I seem to always be able to beat the GPS's estimates by about 10%, so I figured I had about a three-hour margin of safety should I get delayed.

Well, just south of JAX, I started to get a good bit drowsy, so I pulled off into a rest stop, set three alarms on my phone (just in case), and tried to nap for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the Ford Mustang convertible I had been given a free upgrade into was not the most comfortable car: the driver's seat only reclined about 45°, That, combined with the fake-sports-tuned hard chair, made it impossible for me to fall asleep.

I gave up trying about 45 minutes later and got back on the road. Sheer exhaustion wiped over me as I crossed the Georgia state line. I tried everything: blasted upbeat music I could sing along to, called friends and family to keep my mind occupied, and drove with the windows open and the top down despite the chilly night air.

Just south of Savannah, I pulled into a truck stop off I-95 and bought an assortment of energy drinks and chilled Starbucks coffees. I returned to the freeway onramp to find it closed for construction and followed the detour signs into a very small town that was shut down and pitch black for the night. I turned left at the solitary stoplight and proceeded down what looked like a four-lane divided highway through a rural area. A bit down the road, I passed a 45mph speed limit sign, which I thought strange--a rural road like this would have a speed limit of 55 or 65 in most areas! I looked down to my speedometer and saw I was doing 52, but I gradually slowed down a bit anyway. As I got close enough to see the lights of the Interstate underpass, I saw the tail lights of a car a good bit (half a mile or so) ahead of me. I slowly gained on the car. A half a minute later, I got close enough to the tail lights to see the reflective words "POLICE" across the bumper. Oh, crap! I thought, but I looked down at my speedometer to see I was only doing 48, but I tapped my brakes to slow down to 45 anyway.

Right then, the cop, who was in the left lane, slowed way down and fell behind me. He pulled into the right lane behind me and--wouldn't you know it--turned his lights on. I pulled over, absolutely unsure of his motive. Suddenly, the words of a friend from the East Coast echoed through my head: Don't speed on the Interstate in Georgia. The small towns make their money off of catching speeders. Well, was I speeding? Three miles an hour--hardly a major offense, and I wasn't on the Interstate, so I wasn't a rich Northeasterner heading back from his vacation home in Florida. I was tired, but I wasn't driving erratically, so it certainly wasn't under suspicion of drunk driving. Maybe he just had something against red Ford Mustang convertibles driving through his town at 3:30am. (It was a free upgrade--I swear! And after my miserable experience trying to sleep outside of JAX, I was regretting not taking the minivan the rental agent had initially offered me. I'm not a sports car kind of guy!)

As they teach you in How To Be A Jerk Cop school, he asked what my hurry was. I told him the truth: I had a flight out of CLT and had to be there by 10am.

He said, "Well, you were doing 52 in a 35."

I pointed out that I had seen a 45mph speed limit sign well back, and he said, "It's 35 before the sign."

Never mind that 35mph on a major four-lane divided highway in a rural area seemed asinine (if there was a town there, it was completely hidden by the lack of lights)--how on earth could he have caught me before the sign when he was at least a half mile ahead of me and well on the other side of the 45mph speed limit sign--and driving in the same direction as me? In other words, it was a long shot that he could prove I was in the 35mph zone when he radared me out the back window of his moving car. None of this went through my head until well after he left, though, so I simply sat quiet and let him write me a ticket. Well, the $180 ticket more than wiped out my $100 savings for not flying. I instantly regretted not doing the one-way/fly option.

"Drive slower," he said, and when I asked him if I'd make it to CLT in time, he said, "You have plenty of time."

I pulled out, a bit shaken but motivated to get going by the potential penalties of missing my flight, so I proceeded onto the Interstate and continued driving.

I managed to keep from sleeping all the way up I-95 and I-26 through Columbia, SC. As I left Columbia and began to get within sight of the North Carolina border, I started to encounter morning commuter traffic into CLT. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open--even blinking was a painful experience, since my eyes did not want to open back up after the blink. In the left lane not far from the border, I got a scare when I blinked and then felt the rumble strips of the median shake my car. I opened my eyes to discover I had probably fallen asleep for just long enough to drift midway into the shoulder. Fortunately, I was able to quickly recover, and the adrenaline that coursed through my veins was enough to keep me awake to the airport.

Because of my shorter-than-planned nap in JAX, I got to the Thrifty lot at about 9:00am instead of the 10:30 or so I had originally intended. I had originally rented my car at about 6:30am, so I was only 2.5 hours late for my day. Disheartened by the expense of my ticket, I asked the manager on duty if, since I was a good, profitable customer (having bought everything) and a Blue Chip member and thus a loyal Thrifty customer, would he be so kind as to backdate my return and thus waive the three extra hours? "Sure," he said, and proceeded to do so. Thus, the only positive of this experience: I got my Thrifty bill reduced by $120, putting me almost back down to where I had originally planned to be with my expenses.

Originally hailing from California, driving above the posted speed limit is a given for me. (If you drive the 65mph posted in urban Los Angeles or the 70mph posted on I-5, you'll be flashed at, honked at, and flipped off for obstructing traffic.) But despite many years of constantly intentionally driving above the posted speed limit, the only two times previous I'd ever been pulled over were times I honestly had no idea I was exceeding the limit, and both times I was able to keep my driving record clean. (Once was on a freeway exit that dropped to 25mph almost instantly, and the sign was, of course, hidden behind a tree [the officer ended up not ticketing me]; once was on a large, six-lane road in Fairbanks when I didn't realize the speed limit was 40 [the same-size road in Anchorage has a speed limit of 50; I ended up getting that waived with a defensive driving course]; and the third was this time.) So, in order to ensure my driving record remained flawless and my insurance rates low, and because I was pretty sure the cop's claim I was behind the 35mph sign wouldn't stand up in court, I decided to hire an attorney to contest the case. I couldn't find any National Motorists Association-recommended attorneys in the area (Richmond Hill, to be exact) to take my case, but one NMA-recommended attorney in Atlanta I contacted suggested I check with a lawyer out of Savannah, who agreed to take the case for a $400 fee.

The lawyer minced no words: he said that small towns in Georgia really like their traffic citation revenues, so they weren't going to back down easily. However, he thought he could get them to back down to a charge of 4mph or less over the limit if we kept the full $180 fine. Four miles or less over meant that Richmond Hill wouldn't report it to the Georgia DMV, which, in turn, meant that Alaska would never see it. Careful of my clean record, I agreed.

The Richmond Hill police agreed to this, but my decision to save $100 on a flight scared the crap out of me and ended up costing me over $500. And to keep this on-topic: That's the only negative experience I've ever had with Thrifty's one-way policy!

Oh, and next time a decision about my safety comes down to that little of a dollar amount, you can bet which route I'm going to take...