I was lying in bed this morning thinking about this one particular day in America, and I thought that it was just so absurd I should blog about it so that a) everyone could laugh at my misfortune, and b) so I wouldn’t forget any of the details. You should know, this story is 1000% true – I’m not making up, or even exaggerating a single thing. Which is unusual for me, right?
So, let’s set the scene. It’s my last week in America. We’ve already been to Los Angeles, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Cincinnati and we’re about to hit the last place on the ‘to do’ list – Chicago. It’s a Sunday. Oh – and it’s Steve’s birthday. We made the three-hour drive from Cincinnati to Purdue the night before, and stayed in Steve’s apartment, so we could drive the two hours to Chicago in the morning. We paid for a room in this sweet hotel in downtown Chicago, so we were all set!
We begin our journey by getting McGriddles, as we did most days that month, then we start to head north. We drive for about an hour, when –CLUNK- something loud happens in the enginal-region, and the car stops moving. On the highway. In the middle of Indiana.
We roll to the edge of the highway, and get out of the car. Steve calls his Dad. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – I think I did a bit of both. We have to call a tow truck, but we have no idea where we are (apparently ‘on the side of a highway in Indiana’ doesn’t cut it). There is a road sign about 50 metres behind us, so we start to walk back to it.
We’re wading through grass that reaches halfway up our shins, when we hear a faint squeaking sound. I freeze, shooting Steve a look that says, “Holy shit did you hear that what the hell was that noise?!” Steve replies, “mice,” as if it’s totally normal for mice to just hang out in long grass on the side of the road. Suddenly I’m very aware that I’m wearing flimsy ballet flats, and I can somehow feel every blade of grass rubbing on my bare ankles. I start walking quicker, lifting my feet very high out of the grass, hoping that less contact with the ground will equate to less mice running up my legs and eating me alive.
We reach the giant sign that both taunts us that Chicago is still an hour away, and informs us that we are, in fact, in Rensselaer, Indiana.
Where the fuck is Rensselaer, Indiana?
After sprinting back to the car, I launch myself into the passenger seat from 3 metres away. Steve tells me you’re not meant to sit in a car on the side of the highway, in case some drunk guy is swerving around and clips your car at 100 miles an hour. I’m torn between annihilation by a drunk guy’s car, and grass mice. I choose mice.
Cut to one hour later, and we’re sitting in Paul’s tow truck. He says he can take us to the mechanic recommended by Steve’s insurance people, but they probably won’t be open because it’s Sunday. Paul is right. He is also a mechanic, which works out well for us, so he takes us back to his shop.
I think his shop must has been in the city centre, because it was across the road from a CVS Pharmacy, and next door to a decrepit JCPenney’s. We sit inside his mechanic shop, keeping ourselves entertained by reading ‘A Place Prepared For You’, a booklet about heaven that Paul has a big stack of. I start to feel uncomfortable. Paul says that the car’s timing belt broke, and that he can fix it, but it could take a week. Also it may cost $2000. He advises us to go to Plan B.
Okay, we say, we’ll catch the train to Chicago.
Sorry, Amtrak tells us, there is only one train through Rensselaer every three days, and you missed it.
We also learned that the Greyhound doesn’t run on Sundays. And the Amtrak doesn’t even go to Cincinnati from there. And that there is one hire car company in Rensselaer – something like Johnny’s Top Notch Car Hire, not even a legitimate company like Budget or whatever. But being a Sunday, of course they’re closed.
Apparently our only option is to stay in Rensselaer for the night, and figure out something in the morning. There is one hotel in Rensselaer – a Holiday Inn, next to Elmer’s Old Farm (seriously). It’s also next to McDonalds and Arby’s – arguably the most happening part of town. We check ourselves in and, in between trying to get a refund for our hotel in Chicago, research every possible way to get the hell out of Rensselaer. By this time it’s about 9:30am, so we head over to Mcdonald’s for Steve’s birthday breakfast, which requires us to walk through head-height grass, bringing back all the horrible memories of the Highway Mice. I see a furry thing and freak the fuck out, only to realize that it’s just a bunny, and is actually really cute.
There were paddocks of this long grass, broken up by gigantic cornfields, as far as the eye could see. The sky was menacing, full of big, fat, grey clouds, threatening to open up at any moment. That was the closest I have ever felt to being in the movie Twister. We then play in the parking lot of the Arbys, skimming stones in puddles left by a storm the night before. Then we go back to hang out in our room at the Hotel-Motel-Holiday Inn, but not before a stinky drunk woman in the elevator screeches at us to “stop having so much fun!!!!!”
Four hours later we go to the Arbys to drown our sorrows with some milkshakes. Their milkshake machine is broken. I could have cried at this point. We settle for some Jalapeno Poppers, and have a brain wave – maybe there’s a train that goes back to Lafayette, and we can get a hire car to drive back to Cincinnati in the morning. We haul ass through the Twister grass, back to the room to get on the Amtrak website. Result! There was a train going to Lafayette in two hours, but the Amtrak station was like two miles away. And of course there is no cab service in Rensselaer – why would they have a taxi service in a town with a population of 8? So, we have to walk, carrying all the luggage we had brought for our four-day-stay in Chicago. We cross our fingers that our Twister jokes don’t come true for the next two hours, and head down to reception.
Steve stops. “The keys are in the car.”
“What?”
“The keys to my apartment, they’re on my car keys. Paul has them.”
Shit.
Luckily for us Paul was the nicest guy ever, and not some crazy murderer. He got the keys, came and picked us up, and dropped us at the train station.
“You two aren’t having much luck today,” he points out observantly.
“It’s Steve’s birthday,” I tell him. He laughs ruefully and wishes Steve a happy birthday. Steve laughs. It’s lucky we were able to laugh at the whole situation, or we probably would have killed ourselves that day.
It’s about 6:00pm, and we sit at the station, which is a train track with a 1.5m x 2m shack next to it. Inside the shack is a sign with the Mayor of Rensselaer’s phone number, saying to call the Mayor and tell him if you use the Amtrak service from there. Presumably because no one has come to, or left Rensselaer in 500 years, so people utilizing their rail system is a big success for the town.
We wait for about 25 minutes, musing that after this day there was no way the train was going to show up, and that we would likely be kidnapped before we ever got back to Cincinnati. We hear a faint rumbling, and see a light approaching in the distance. We start cheering and clapping and high-fiving each other, as if we had accomplished some really great feat. The conductor tells us we weren’t on her manifest since we booked our tickets so late, and they almost didn’t stop for us. I could have kissed her.
Ninety minutes later, we roll into West Lafayette. We had planned a really fancy birthday dinner that night, and Steve had packed a nice dress shirt and tie, and he didn’t want to forfeit his chance to wear them, so we put all our luggage down and he put them on. It was a Sunday night in a college town on summer break, so everything was closed except for a cheap Chinese takeaway place. We go in and order our fancy ‘Happy Birthday Steve’ dinner, and the dude brings our food over to us and also gives us a fortune cookie each. Steve picked up his fortune cookie, and he got two in the one packet! – it must have been his lucky day.
