Creative Parking

Here's my rental car in the tight parking place at my hotel in Germany. It was my first day in years driving a car with a stick so putting in that spot was a bit of a challenge. It's actually sort of an elevator setup and when I got there, there were no spaces. A German guy driving a Smart Car arrived just after me and started fiddling with the hydraulic controls, trying to raise one if the cars, so he could park his on the platform below. I had visions of crushing someone's $80 K BMW and was all-to-eager to let him be the one to figure it out.
Fortunately for the BMW owners he couldn't get the controls to work and went upstairs to ask for help. He came back, saying that he had to exit the garage, which he accomplished with the kind of speedy U-turn that could only be managed in that space by a Smart Car and go to a different entrance where an even more bewildering car elevator could be used.
I began struggling to make a U-turn with my larger vehicle - usually remembering that I wasn't driving an automatic, when - much to my relief - someone vacated a parking space!
Twenty minutes later, with two or three exits from the car to check my clearance and extricate my suitcase from the trunk, thanking myself for having purchased the comprehensive insurance package, my car was safely and snugly parked.