As usual, I went up to Chicago last weekend. On Saturday K and I went down to Princeton, IL to help her grandma move some boxes into storage. We had a nice time, ate way too much bad Chinese buffet, and headed up to Ottawa, IL to visit her sister.
When P and I went to the storage garage we unloaded the car and when we got back in all we heard was a click. The good ole reliable Neon decided not to start. P and I called K who graciously came to pick us up. We had to punch the exit code to let her in to try to jump the car. This of course didn't work so we had to push the Neon out of the fenced in storage center and into the parking lot. As I was pushing, P ran up ahead and tried to punch in the gate code so we wouldn't lose momentum. Unfortunately, the gate thought we had exited when we let K in so it wouldn't work. P had to scale the barbed wire fence to punch in the entrance code.
We drove up to the local service station and after a dozen questions regarding the cost we found out that it would be $50 to tow it less than a mile. This of course wasn't acceptable so I called the insurance company. Ninety minutes later a tow truck, in fact the same tow truck that wanted the fifty spot, came and towed me for free to the same service station where the original inquiry took place.
K and I stayed in Ottawa overnight, ate pizza, cooed over the new baby, and relaxed after the frustration of losing a car nowhere near home. The next morning P graciously took us up to the Joliet train station and related a funny story about getting his window smashed in by a snow plow. K and I took the train back to Chicago, made dinner, watched my new guilty pleasure "Project Runway", and played yahtzee!
At 7:00 I took a taxi to the Amtrack where a nice homeless man opened the door for me and wanted a dollar for the service. Even for Chicago this seemed steep so I declined and headed back to Waterloo where A was waiting to bring me back to the Fort. I woke up a few hours later to return to work, carless.
