It’s Thursday. Time to write the blog. I’m sitting out on the porch watching the rain fall, listening to the grumble of thunder, and thinking about this interesting week.
We came home from the beach like the ocean–in waves, some of us on Sunday and some of us on Labor Day itself. My thought process was that I didn’t want to be on the road on Labor Day, and it turns out I was right. There are too many nut jobs out there who are tail-gating jerks, who drive 80 MPH when everyone else is doing sixty or less, and who duck in and out of lanes, passing on all sides with wild abandon. The only time they’re happy is when they’re on somebody else’s back-bumper. The Sunday travelers made it home without a hitch. The Monday travelers? Not so much.
Just north of Lacey, one of the tail-gaters couldn’t stop in time when traffic came to a halt in front of him, and he nailed the CRV carrying our kids and two of our granddaughters. He hit them not just once but three times, hard enough that the back end of their SUV collapsed and knocked both the front and back seats loose. The momentum from the blow sent the vehicle sailing across FOUR LANES OF TRAFFIC and onto the median!! The car is probably totaled, but the real miracle is that no one was badly hurt. Bumps and bruises is all. Still, it doesn’t do much good to have your kids belted in when the force of the blow collapses the seat backs.
The cops came. The guy who hit them, a speed-demon heading back home to Idaho, claimed he’d been hit from behind, but Celeste, whose 9th birthday we’ll celebrate this weekend, said “I checked. There wasn’t a mark on his car!” (I think she’s going to be a detective when she grows up.) The cop didn’t believe the guy’s story, either, and slapped him with a ticket. Once the car was towed away, the cop gave the family and their luggage a ride to the nearest Appleby’s where the manager, having been told their story, welcomed them with free drinks and appetizers while they figured out how to get home.
They tried calling a car rental agency, but it was Labor Day. Car rental offices were all closed, so then they called us. For those of you NOT familiar with Washington State geography, they were in Lacey, and they needed to get home to Silverdale. We were in Bellevue. It’s seventy miles on 405 and I-5 from our house to where they were, and sixty miles in another direction for them to get home, after they turn off I-5 in Tacoma. There were four of them. We have a car that holds a driver and three passengers. This is sounding a lot like that old joke about getting the cat, the dog, and the chicken across the river. So as Bill and I headed out the door, I was talking to the Hertz people and arranging to rent a car at Sea-Tac. It may have been Labor Day, but the airport car rental counters were still open.
For everyone’s inconvenience, the car rental building is now some distance from the airport itself. With Bill at the wheel and me riding shot-gun, I had a phone to each ear–one for the Hertz people and one for our daughter. At the last moment before scrambling out of the car, Bill gave me final directions about where we were going. “Call me,” he said, as he and Bella drove away. I would have done so, too, but while I waited at the counter behind an irate customer who hadn’t been given the upgrade he wanted, I discovered I had both of our phones and my iPad in my pockets. We had to revert to doing things the old fashioned way. You go where you said you were going, and you get there when you get there with no conversations in between.
As I said, I didn’t want to be out in traffic on Labor Day, and there was plenty of that. As I drove south, I saw one wreck in the northbound lanes. Driving through Tacoma, the setting sun was directly in my eyes. Just because I was carefully leaving three car lengths between me and the car in front of me didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of yahoos who darted into that space after passing me on the right and before passing someone else on the left, but I made the seventy mile trip without incident. Bill was already at Appleby’s when I got there. We loaded all the luggage into the rental, then we had to go back to Sea-Tac to add Cindy and Jim to the rental agreement. That entailed another long wait because there was only one person laboring at the counter on Labor Day.
That was Monday evening. Tuesday I slept until ten AM, something I never do, and I wasn’t good for much all day. Yesterday I spent finalizing travel arrangements for the tour. I’ve spent more time on the phone with Hertz this week than I would have thought possible. By this time next week, I’ll be two days into the tour, the Second Fire Tour as we call it around here, and the blog will become Tales from the Trail for the next several weeks.
It’s still raining. The thunder is no longer grumbling, it’s cracking and banging. Much as Bella loves me, she’s decided the back porch isn’t for her this morning. She just went back inside. Maybe I’ll do the same thing.
I try to maintain an attitude of gratitude in this blog, so today I’m giving a big shout out and two thumbs up to Appleby’s!! As for the other driver? Don’t be surprised if a tail-gaiting yahoo from Idaho doesn’t wind up dead in one of my books! Soon!