I wanted to go on a trip. A majority of my friends from school found their niche on the eastern seaboard, so I decided to point my little orange car east and see where it took me. My friend Kate who had been living at my house all summer was moving to North Carolina to live with our friend Lexie, which gave me a first destination. I made a plan: NC to DC, DC to CT, CT to MA and VT, VT to NE. It would be a lot of driving, and not that much time visiting each place, but I managed to give myself a few days at each location.
About three hours in to our epic journey, I learned that only fools make plans. Thirty miles outside of Kansas City we drove through some construction; I was in my car in the lead and Kate was driving in her car behind me. They were working on the shoulder, so instead of the smooth expanse with rumble bars to wake up sleepy drivers drifting off the road, the side of the interstate just dropped off a good 4 inches. As Kate listened to "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" and snacked on some beef jerky, her car slipped off the edge of shoulder. I noticed movement in my rear view mirror, and watched in horror as she spun off the interstate at 75 mph. She hit a cable barrier fence with the front of her car, chunks of her Subaru flying everywhere, which spun her around in the opposite direction, tearing off her back bumper and brake light as the back of the car hit the same fence and took out a sign that read, "Caution: Shoulder Drop Off."
Somehow I managed to pull my car off the side of the interstate and started sprinting the half mile it took me to stop safely back to Kate's car, which sat facing West. I must have looked fully capable, because not a single other person stopped to help. Miraculously Kate was entirely unharmed, so I called 911 who connected me to highway patrol, who sent 5 whole vehicles to get us out of our pickle. With the help of a very impatient trooper, who threw all of Kate's worldly possessions onto the side of the interstate, we transferred everything from Kate's car to my car before the tow truck arrived to whisk the mangled vehicle away. Everyone seemed confused when Kate and I didn't know what we were supposed to do next. "Well if you're driving that way you might as well keep going," the tow truck driver told us, without any explanation as to what was going to happen to Kate's car if we just left it in Oak Grove, MO while we trotted off to NC.
Kate started calling her parents, who tried to get in touch with their insurance company. State Farm is indeed like a good neighbor, but if it's Sunday you're going to have to wait until Monday for them to do anything about it, so we became reluctant residents of room 211 at Days Inn. We found one restaurant open on Sundays, a Chinese restaurant where the owner's 8 year old daughter was our waitress and my chicken fried rice had actual fried chicken in it. We drove around the Missouri countryside for a while, trying to calm our nerves, sure that we would be on the road again soon the next day.
On Monday morning it was raining, but I told Kate it could be worse. "We could be dead," I said, but she wasn't too reassured. "I don't like that the only other situation worse than this is death," she said. We checked out at the last minute, deciding that if we had to stay in this dismal town another night we were getting nicer digs. We went to Subway and watched the torrential downpour out the window as Kate went back and forth between the insurance company, her parents, and Steve Skaggs, Procision Auto.
Kate and I, who clearly know nothing about vehicle maintenance, decided at the latest they could have her car all fixed and ready by the next morning. Steve Skaggs told us it would take him a week and a half. Rather than sit around and pay for hotel rooms for a week and a half we decided the best option was for Kate to ride the rest of the way in my car, and then she would fly back when the car was fixed and pick it up to drive the rest of the way to NC. Before this happened, however, we had to spend two and a half hours sitting in Steve Skaggs' office trying to get a hold of Kate's dad, who, it turned out, had gone to the gym.
At 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, three days after Kate and I had left the fine city of Omaha, NE for the Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill area of NC, a trip that should have taken us 19 hours, we arrived. As for North Carolina, I'm pretty smitten. It feels kind of like Ohio at times, but different in a way that's hard to place. The trees are different, we decided, or maybe the grass. We found a weird tea/smoothie place that puts tapioca pearls at the bottom of your drink, which don't taste bad but feel like you're chewing on fish eyeballs. Lexie's boyfriend took us to the beach yesterday, where we battled surfers for waves and got horribly sunburned. All in all it's a place I think I could live if things with the German Battleaxe don't work out.
My future trip plans are cloudy and tentative; losing that travel day really set me back. What I know for sure: on Saturday I leave this sunny southern state for our great nation's capital, where I will stay until Monday. Until then, here's to hoping I used up my drama quota for the rest of the week.
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