Dearest Readers,
Don’t worry, I’m giving myself a proverbial slap on the wrist for my bad blogging behavior. (isn’t proverbial a great word … it’s a current favorite this summer alongside adulation … I always have favorite words that I am obsessed with using so nerd alert). Anywhoo, so I am currently at work (oh snap rebel), but I have a few minutes of down time (which I normally never have here), so I am using them to my blog-ticious advantage. So on with the promised saga of broken down cars and twister boards.
Background info: I have nine close friends from high school, who I love dearly, and this summer we went to Ocean City Maryland for a week-ish-er. We went last year, because one of the boys has a house there, so we decided to return again…cause it’s fab and fun and sunny and hilarious.
Okay, so five of us, who left a few days early to get back to work, were on our way home from the beach (approximately a 7 hour drive) in my friend’s 109-year-old (slight exaggeration) Subaru—I named it Babu cause if you shorten Subaru to baru it’s kind of close. Thanks to bad luck it took us 9 hours to drive down to the beach, so we were bound and determined to make it home faster.
The drive was smooth and thanks to some left lane driving we were set to make it home in 6.5 hours … isn’t that always when the problem starts; just when you think you are in the clear … sigh. We were an hour and a half from home, it was 3:30 pm, when the driver at the time, who I will call Athletiman, noticed the car was making odd noises, we pulled into a parking lot of a middle school on the side of the highway and sure enough, smoke starts billowing out of the hood of the car. As images of the car exploding into a fire ball and the headline “Teens die in tragic fire incident” leapt to our minds as we sprang from the car in a high-pitched, scream-y panic. Little did we know this was just the beginning of a 3-hour-saga … which I kept dubbing the ‘3 hour tour,’ a line from the theme song of Gilligan’s Island.
While my friend who owned the car, who I will call Lobsterfilm, was on the phone with his dad trying to figure out what the problem was, the 4 of us called our parents to tell them we would be delayed. No end in sight. We called triple A and were told it would be a half hour before they were with us. No biggie. We all peed in the woods by the middle school … marking our territory I guess. 45 minutes passed of sitting by the road…no triple a. We call again and find out they are the wrong road…how reassuring…the people sent to rescue us with the best navigation devices around are lost. This is when the creativity began. We have no clue when Triple A will come rescue us considering we are 5 teenagers who sound like we have no idea what we are doing (because we don’t). We remember that twister, the board game of fun, is in the trunk and Athletiman pulls out his portable i-pod speakers. We bring out all the snacks we brought, set them up picnic style, and party it up. As we awkwardly stretch around the board, very confused cars pass us on the highway … a lot of them beep—no one stops to help—I guess the beep was supposed to be like a “good luck don’t die” beep…moreso it just pissed us all off because it was like they were saying “nah nah nah boo boo we are driving and you aren’t.” An hour and a half later, just as we were putting our left foot on green (and tangling up to a whole new level of awkward), triple a pulled in. I have never been so happy to see a tow truck. They tell us that the car can’t be fixed today, and we can’t drive it home. Well good. We had to call someone’s parents to come drive us home … while we waited another hour and a half, we peed in the woods more, and ate all of our provisions (since it was dinner time at this point). Around 7 they pulled in and I swear we all nearly cried, I wanted to kiss their champagne colored mini van (my loyalty to babu was totally severed now that the car had officially failed us) and we clambered in to watch Toy Story on their dvd player, eat more junk food, and drive home. After getting lost on the way home (of course), we finally made it home by 9:30. It was an 11 and a half hour car ride. 11 and a half hours. Just let that sink in. It’s not that 11 and a half hours is that long, it’s that we had only mentally prepared ourselves for 6 and a half hours. That’s not a fun mental transition. At all.
Lesson to be learned: Anything can be hilarious and a fun experience when turned the right way. We took advantage of the time spent on the side of the road with a little flair…and a game board. So even when you find yourself in the worst pickle yet, just make pickle-ade I guess. I’m not trying to say it won’t still be an un-fun situation, but hey, it makes for a kicking story … or maybe, just a kicking blog entry.
Twister-ly Yours,
Adorkable
ps. like the new layout??
