November 18, 2022
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
By Mikie Baker
The Bandera Prophet
Recently, My Future Husband thought that he missed being in the hospital, so he decided to go down quick so he could get a free trip back to the ER at the VA in San Antonio. After a week of pure craziness, he came back out of his weirdness and demanded to get out as quickly as humanly possible so we could go vote on election day. Maybe I shouldn’t have promised to get him to our voting precinct because that was my curse.
It started out easy enough as the hospital staff were waiting for me so they could kick him to the curb and use the hospital bed for someone else that just missed the hospital. After barking many orders to me, they whisked him out of there in a wheelchair and we were Hill Country bound.
Of course, any man that’s eaten hospital food for a week, demands a Chicken Fried Steak as a reward, so we headed off to Luby’s for that meal with all the trimming and lots of gravy. And no, gravy is not why he was in the hospital.
Anyway, we had a nice lunch and then headed back during rush hour to get out of the Big City and press on to our voting precinct. We were on a roll.
Until we weren’t. Buck, my 2009 Buick Edge with 221,000 miles on it decided to possibly take his last breath right there in the middle of the left lane of a crowded two-lane road during rush hour. Sigh.
God has angels and he sent two nice men to come to the aid of a damsel in distress and push my car out of the traffic and right into a parking lot where we landed in front of a liquor store. That should have been my first clue.
Now for all you men out there, women freak out when their car doesn’t work. Doesn’t matter if it’s a tire, a battery, no gas, whatever. We go into panic mode. Plus, I was lugging a weak man straight out of the hospital, a wheelchair, a walker (options you know) and a couple of large bags from the hospital that included much, much more than we brought in. We were stuck.
Being a woman who’s pretty capable with a cell phone while shaking, I managed to go thru the latest evil thing – emergency service via texting and a diabolical robot. When nothing was working, I pushed every number in the book to get to a live human who could help me. Come to find out, my insurance only covers a tow for up to 18 miles, not the hour drive to my “local” car dealership. Rural living can be evil when your car is broken. He explained that if I wanted Buck towed to my dealership, it would cost me a mere $800. Sorry dude, Christmas is coming up. I elected to have it towed 1.84 miles to the nearest Pep Boys. And they weren’t very peppy.
The towing company texted me and said it would be 150 minutes until somebody showed up to help me. That’s when I really considered buying everything in the liquor store. A promise is a promise, you know.
As I have always believed, a woman with a credit card can fix anything, so I sprang into action. I called Uber (we’ve only used them once before, but still had the app) and I figured if I could get some fool to drive us an hour north, I could borrow a spare car from my office, and we could take the other hour drive to get to the voting pole.
To be continued…
It started out easy enough as the hospital staff were waiting for me so they could kick him to the curb and use the hospital bed for someone else that just missed the hospital. After barking many orders to me, they whisked him out of there in a wheelchair and we were Hill Country bound.
Of course, any man that’s eaten hospital food for a week, demands a Chicken Fried Steak as a reward, so we headed off to Luby’s for that meal with all the trimming and lots of gravy. And no, gravy is not why he was in the hospital.
Anyway, we had a nice lunch and then headed back during rush hour to get out of the Big City and press on to our voting precinct. We were on a roll.
Until we weren’t. Buck, my 2009 Buick Edge with 221,000 miles on it decided to possibly take his last breath right there in the middle of the left lane of a crowded two-lane road during rush hour. Sigh.
God has angels and he sent two nice men to come to the aid of a damsel in distress and push my car out of the traffic and right into a parking lot where we landed in front of a liquor store. That should have been my first clue.
Now for all you men out there, women freak out when their car doesn’t work. Doesn’t matter if it’s a tire, a battery, no gas, whatever. We go into panic mode. Plus, I was lugging a weak man straight out of the hospital, a wheelchair, a walker (options you know) and a couple of large bags from the hospital that included much, much more than we brought in. We were stuck.
Being a woman who’s pretty capable with a cell phone while shaking, I managed to go thru the latest evil thing – emergency service via texting and a diabolical robot. When nothing was working, I pushed every number in the book to get to a live human who could help me. Come to find out, my insurance only covers a tow for up to 18 miles, not the hour drive to my “local” car dealership. Rural living can be evil when your car is broken. He explained that if I wanted Buck towed to my dealership, it would cost me a mere $800. Sorry dude, Christmas is coming up. I elected to have it towed 1.84 miles to the nearest Pep Boys. And they weren’t very peppy.
The towing company texted me and said it would be 150 minutes until somebody showed up to help me. That’s when I really considered buying everything in the liquor store. A promise is a promise, you know.
As I have always believed, a woman with a credit card can fix anything, so I sprang into action. I called Uber (we’ve only used them once before, but still had the app) and I figured if I could get some fool to drive us an hour north, I could borrow a spare car from my office, and we could take the other hour drive to get to the voting pole.
To be continued…