I Look Like a Terrorist (Apparently)

Sorry, sorry! It's taken me longer than I planned to get back to this and finish up my tale. For some reason life intervened the last few days. Our area had one of the wettest winter storms we've had since we lived here. (If we were living in a place with real winter, it would have been snow, but hey, for us sunshine-in-January people, it was kind of a shock.) Anyway, we got a bit flooded in here. I couldn't even get my kids to school on Friday, and being stuck at home with all the kids does not make for peaceful blog writing time.

Well, I've kept you in suspense long enough. To finish up my tale of the Bonehead Award-Winning Trip:

Hmm, where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, I was in the middle of nowhere with a dead car and a tow truck who couldn't figure out where I was. Just when I was beginning to wonder if I should give up and strike it out on foot in hopes of finding a pay phone within five miles, the tow truck finally rolled up. I was saved! He wasn't a very pleasant rescuer-- he grumbled and groused the whole time-- but I was sooo glad he was there. Apparently, the road on the other side of the airport had the same name, and he complained that of course he had assumed I was on that side, because there was nothing on this side of the airport, so what person in their right mind would be hanging out in the middle of empty fields? It was irritating, but at least I was going to survive my first business trip, which was all I cared about at this point.

After he jumped the battery, he told me that the battery was testing so low that I might not want to turn the car off for any reason, or I might not be able to get it started again. Not reassuring when I had a several hour drive ahead of me, and um, I needed gas too. (Terence would be rolling his eyes at this point because this is so like me-- to be nearly out of gas with a dead cell phone.) Now, since I've lived in Phoenix, I've learned that you can indeed fill your gas tank up with your engine still running-- anybody who has had to get gas during a summer day in Phoenix can tell you that, because even two minutes with no A/C will fry you alive. But at this point in time I was still living in San Diego, so I assumed that if I filled the gas tank up in Gypsum with the engine still on I would blow up the car. So I took what I thought to be the least risky of the two options: to head back through avalanche-prone mountains in the dark with little more than a quarter tank of gas, and hope that I could get to Denver before I needed to stop.

My only excuse is that I was 22 years old, and I was still about as reckless as a teenager.

Once I got back onto the freeway, and the cell phone was plugged into the charger, I called my dad to give him an update on where I was before I lost my cell service. At this point, my father probably was near having a stroke from stress, especially when he learned that I had decided to risk the return trip through the mountains. (He wanted me to find a hotel room in Vail. My boss was less-than-enthusiastic about that, since it would be on the company's tab.) I did spare my dad the knowledge that I was a bit low on gas though. He didn't need to know everything, right?

Well, I must have had guardian angels watching over me that night because despite all my crazy risk-taking I made it through the mountains. Still, I was having frequent phone conversations with my father again because it was so late there was a good chance I was going to miss my flight home. For some unknown reason, the new Denver airport is built like 200 miles away from Denver itself, so even though I was coming into the city, I still had a long way to go. My gas light was on by this time, but I didn't know the city at all, and there just didn't seem to be any gas stations right off the freeway! Who planned this city anyway? When I did finally find somewhere to stop, my dad insisted I call him right after, lest I was in a bad part of town and some hoodlum decided to carjack me or something. At this point, now that I was near reasonably cheap motels, my boss wanted me to stop for the night, but this didn't exactly please my dad-- he wanted me to stay in a nice place in a safe area. But since I didn't know Denver at all, how was I going to figure out which area was "safe?" In the end I decided to press my luck and race on to the airport.

My luck held and I arrived at the Denver airport maybe 30 minutes before my flight took off. I hastily turned in my irritating rental car without bothering to argue about the nearly dead battery and hurried to the terminal-- only to get stopped at security. When my flow test kit went through the x-ray, apparently it freaked out the security guy. When he opened up the kit and pulled out the strange-looking metal gauges, he seemed to think they were sinister weapons, parts of bombs or something, I guess. I got the third degree about what these things were for. He seemed to find it incredible that a young woman would need something like this on a plane. For crying out loud, I just wanted to get home!!!! Finally he decided I wasn't a terrorist and let me through. (This was pre 9/11 luckily, or they probably would never have let me on the plane at all.)

I just made it onto the plane in time. About two AM, I pulled up to my house and dragged myself into bed, swearing that I never, ever wanted to travel again. And at the next team meeting, everyone found the story of my trip so hilariously entertaining that they decided that I deserved the honor of the Bonehead. But hey, there was some good that came out of that trip. My boss (under severe pressure from my dad, who was his boss) decided to buy four "roamer" cell phones that us lower-rank employees could check out to take on business trips, just in case anyone else was stupid enough to run the car battery down in the middle of nowhere!