The next day’s travel continued smoothly through the day, perhaps lulling us into a false sense of security. We arrived safely at our chosen Red Roof destination, and, voila! A parking lot that was nearly empty, went all the way around the hotel, and was big. I parked the truck and headed to check us in.
“Is that your Penske truck?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“You can’t park it in the lot, it takes up too much space. We’re going to be pretty much full tonight. You have to move it to the auxiliary lot over there, right behind the main lot.”
I looked out at the proffered parking lot, and my heart instantly fluttered with trepidation. Sure, it was empty, but it was small. Treacherously small. Grad school efficiency apartment small.
I sucked it up and went to move the truck. Not being too familiar with the mechanics of trucks and trailers, I figured my best bet was to head into the lot, make as wide a circle as I could, and then, if I had to, back up a little and finish my turn. So, that’s what I proceeded to do.
It seemed like it was going so well, that when I did come up a little short of being able to completely make a circle in the lot, I just put it in reverse, pushed back about 3 feet, and then started to pull forward. When Heidi came sprinting over from her car, where she had been unloading stuff, I figured that she had suddenly been struck by a random thought about where to eat that evening, or that the urge to stretch her legs after a long day’s driving had overwhelmed her without warning.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“Uh…moving the truck.”
“Didn’t you hear the horrible noise it was making?”
“Uh…no.”
I reached for the door, to go look at the trailer.
“Never mind, now. Go ahead and pull forward and straighten up.”
So I did, and then hopped down to look at the trailer. My heart, I have to say, was already sinking.
...the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness...
And when I saw the trailer, my heart gave up with the sinking stuff, and went ahead and just plummeted. Fell off the table. Think of the worst beat you ever took on the river, and multiply it by the second-worst. My choice of language was constrained only by my vocabulary of profanity, my creativity, my ability to string together words without repeating them, and my knowledge of human anatomy. If there had been a baseball bat handy, I would have wielded it with abandon about my own head and neck until I gained the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness.
Because the trailer, to put it delicately, was fucked. Straight up, no questions asked, no holds barred, no doubt about it. In a matter of minutes, our smoothly proceeding trip had taken a turn for the horrific. A fragment from a conversation that I had recently engaged in with Heidi floated through my brain, something like, “sure, sweetie, I mean they wouldn’t rent these things to people if they were impossible to drive!”
This premise, although credible on its face, had proven to be patently untrue. I had jackknifed the trailer and then pushed it backward with the truck, and in the process bent the tongue of the trailer into something that more closely resembled a work of modern art than a working piece of machinery. Since it was obvious that the trailer could no longer be safely driven, I had to call Penske and hope that they could hook us up.
Thankfully, they did. Props to Penske, man, they had a wrecker driver there within an hour, towing a new trailer to carry our car. He helped me unhook the damaged one, hook the new one up, and even rearrange the truck with the new trailer in tow once we got it attached and the car up on it, just to help me avoid a repetition of the event. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but if I did, I’d tell it to you, just so you could share in how cool the guy was. Or I’d give him a bunch of money. If I had it. The money, that is. Oh, and props to myself and Heidi as well for having the foresight to buy the optional insurance on the trailer, without which we would undoubtedly now be staring at a rather large bill from Penske.
So, with a huge crisis seemingly behind us, we slept, perhaps not as well as the night before, but as well as could be expected, with the INVASION OF POISONOUS SPIDERS that was soon to follow!
OK, I’m kidding about the spiders, but there were several annoying children at the hotel that we had to deal with for a while. But, we overcame them in the end, and thus ended the second night of our trip.
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