Rusty

* This post was constructed and posted on Tuesday, 9 Feb 2010 for reason that will become self-evident as you read.  I posted it with a date of 7 Feb 2010 simply to remain consistent with the fact that these events unfolded over the weekend and that every other post goes up on a Sunday.*

This weekend I took a little trip for work and because of the location, I decided to stay the whole weekend with some friends I knew in the area.  We had a great time and I left earlier than anticipated on Sunday morning to beat the weather home.  There was supposed to be a storm coming in and I didn’t want to drive too much in that storm if I could avoid it.

Things were going really well until I hit a patch of ice.  It was on a corner and the back end of my car slid out to the side.  It tapped the guard rail and put me in the ditch.  Basically, it was the best situation because there was a cement wall that was about 25 to 50 feet back on the road that if I had hit would have caused some serious damage to the front end of my vehicle.

This started the experience of trying to get home.

I had the car towed to a repair shop and attempted some really minor things that might get Rusty to start.  None of them worked so I went and checked into what was an absolute dump of a hotel.  The room was quite literally just a bed and a foldable table and chair.  The table had an old 12 inch tube TV on it and a rotary phone.  Everyone was super pleasant, but you got what you paid for there.  The bed was about as firm as a marshmallow, but it was a bed in a heated room, so I couldn’t complain too much.

The following morning I started my insurance claim and attempted to find a way home.  Because my car was not drivable, I was going to get a rental car.  Those plans were brought to an abrupt end when we realized (my Dad, the insurance agent and myself) there wasn’t a rental car company anywhere near the tiny town I was in.  I ended up purchasing a Greyhound Bus ticket and getting a ride from the hotel attendant to the local bus station.

The bus station (which was also a gas station) had a small table that I camped out at for nearly eight hours while I waited for the one bus that leaves the town.  It took me to a town to the North (I am trying to get South at this point) where I found out the one bus going South from there was cancelled.  I was told to try going farther North in order to increase my chances of getting on a bus that night.  I went to the next town to the North and the same story was repeated.  I went to the farthest North station this bus operates and found that the South-facing buses were all cancelled until the next morning.

I spent a chilly night sleeping on the metal mesh benches in the bus terminal.  The security officer seemed to be okay with an indoor temperature of 50 degrees, so I woke up from a few fitful and uncomfortable hours of sleep shivering violently.  Usually you can concentrate and get a couple seconds reprieve from the shivers, but these were the full body shakes that wouldn’t go away.  I walked about 20 laps of the inside of the terminal to get the blood pumping which brought the muscle convulsions to a bearable level (they didn’t go away completely for another two hours).

We found out the bus that was going to take me home was leaving that morning and I got a ticket issued to me.  It was operated by an alliance bus group that doesn’t speak English, so loading was a bit of a fiasco with people not knowing where to go or what to give to whom.  After we were all seated, we began the reverse journey I had taken the night before.

In the first town, we picked up a few more people and a guy got on who decided the seat next to me would be the most comfortable.  That’s fine; I have nothing wrong with sharing space with another person.  He promptly told me he had just been released from a federal prison the day before and he was headed to a halfway house to get things back in order before he went back out to society.  This piqued my curiosity.

It turns out he was in prison for drug trafficking, small arms dealings, stabbing a K-9 unit and putting a human cop in the hospital.  I’m starting to get uncomfortable as he begins to outline how he hates the government and thinks the current political situation is ‘sh*t’.  When asked what I do, I simply said I work with computer security.  I figured that would alleviate any problems we might have had.

On the eight hour drive home, he talked about how he hated snow and the current weather and wouldn’t hear that there was somewhere outside of LA that was capable of supporting human life.  He came up with such gems as:

“Here parents punish their children by sending them outside.”

or

“Those aren’t real cows.  They are either plastic or frozen solid.”

and

“F*ck this town; the only kind of people that live here are uni-bombers.”

I thought that last one was especially classy.

I finally got home safe and sound with all my belongings and got picked up by a friend.  When I went to eat dinner at another friend’s house, I was told that I was never to do that again.  If I am in a 500 mile radius of one of the guys, I am to call him and he will leave right then to pick me up.

If only I had thought of that before I got on the bus.

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  By Sarah, 10 February 2010 @ 1218

  Wow…

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