Nuts in Nederland

Every night before Ana goes to bed she likes me to tell her a "story that really happened". Thankfully, all the years that I was a college student have provided a lifetime of stories. And almost all of them involve my chaotic adventures in my car.

Like...

The time I ran out of gas (for the 14th time).

The two times I totaled a car while eating and driving. And how the last totaled car enabled me to use the insurance money to buy a round-trip ticket to Europe and during that trip I proposed to Jeroen on top of the Eiffel Tower.

The Honda that I bought without an ignition that had a toggle switch. No keys required.

The Volkswagen that had a bad habit of overheating and required me to crawl under it
and hit it with a hammer to start.

The time I drove around all summer in my T-Bird without a passenger side window (from one of the crashes while I was eating and driving) and cats slept in my car.

The time I picked up a homeless man in my T-Bird (who stuck his head in my car at a stop light...remember there was no passenger window!) and I made him sit in the backseat with my friend Isaac who told me the guy STANK and we took him to the bank (for all we knew we could have been the getaway car)

and...

The time I ran out of gas at four in the morning in Oklahoma during a road trip and got a ride with a lady trucker and her two Chow dogs who dropped me off at a highway exit sign and then I ended up falling into a huge hole of mud and twisted my ankle and limped into the convenient store crying as if I had been abducted by tribal savages and made my escape.

And tonight's story featured yet another story of me and one of my cars.

I told Ana about the time I was working at Gardski's Restaurant in Amarillo, Texas when I was a student at West Texas A&M University. I got off work rather late and was starving. I headed to the drive thru of Long John's Silvers to grab some fish and hush puppies to go. As I drove the 30 minutes to Canyon (where I lived), I steered the car with my knee while munching on my dinner.

As I drove on I-27, I noticed a car tailing me and it made me feel a bit nervous. So, I sped up. But then the car also sped up. I whipped out of my lane and floored it. The car continued to follow me. As I got into town I drove past my house so the car wouldn't follow me home. I made sharp turns in an effort to ditch him, but the car kept following me. I ran stop signs and swung around corners until I was completely blocked in at in intersection with car headlights blinding my vision.

As I rolled down my window to the approaching driver, he told me...

"Ma'am, we've been following you ever since you were on I-27. Your driving seemed erratic and the officer following you alerted the Canyon city police. We thought maybe you had been drinking."

And I explained, "No, sir. I was just eating my dinner. Wanna hush puppy?"

And Ana just laughed. All those wild stories sure make great bedtime stories.