A night to remember
June 4th, 2009
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Well, I could drag out the cliffhanger (and actually wish I had the time to, hehe), but I wont. I hope it is not too anti-climatic, for sure it was not mundane.
There was a very pleasant little motel out in the middle of farmland, OH. Gentle rolling hills, a well kept lawn and freshly painted exterior. The proprietress sold candles and potpourri in the office. Except for the viciously barking dog, it seemed a perfect place to spend a quiet night.
The trouble started with my computer. It was acting very peculiar; wouldn’t log on, and locking up with a weird error message I had never seen before. Needless to say this is a distressing situation for a guy blogging a bike trip across the country, with countless details and contacts that must be kept on top of, lest the backlog get out of hand and everyone becomes more in the dark than you all are already. It had to be fixed, or I had to buy a new one, (no, I would not have spent your money on that…) So, I got to it. Was blessed to have an Indiana supporter Joyce Morrel contact me for another reason, and she was kind enough to hook me up with Jerry Titus, who knows a thing or three about computers, so we went through the standard diagnostics and it remained… weird. ugh.
After a while I realized that reformatting was probably my last option and began the process of backing up the data critical to the ride. By the time I got to the point of hitting that dreaded reformat key, it was midnight, the witching hour…
I should mention that the night was stormy. Not the downpours of Hawaii; not the blizzards of NY; not even the gales of the sea. No, it was the kind of thunderstorms only the midwest can dish out. Completely wild and crazy. I mean, I love a good thunderstorm, but this was off the scale, crackling bolts and shocking booms, near and far. I don’t think I had every seen such fury. And there I was nervously reformatting my lifeline to the world at large…
But that wasn’t the half of it…
Around 1 am, I was suddenly startled by the sound of a car-horn being relentlessly triggered outside my door. I was like, WTH??? So I got up, opened the door to the pouring rain, looked out, and there was a red SUV with someone, obviously interested in waking the entire motel, sitting behind the wheel. It was raining too hard to see much and I sure as hell was not going to “get involved”. I was one door down from the office and figured the management would be there shortly, I had my computer to work on. So I shook my head, closed the door, and my ears, and got back to work. Before long, I saw the flashing lights of the police, so stuck my head back out to see what was up, only to find the proprietress outside my door in a nightgown, she looked at me and said, “she’s a psycho”, I was like, “oookaaaayyyy…” Can’t recall what I said back, but eventually closed the door, by now it is about 2 am. I figured the cops had the psycho under control so went back to work on the box.
Meanwhile, the storms raged and the excitement had not begun to abate…
After years of working on stage I am pretty good at concentrating amid myriad distractions, but suddenly, there was even more activity out side than before, people running back and forth in front of the picture window, raised voices, flashing lights… again I was like, WTH
FIRE!!!!
O.M.G.
I just stood in my doorway and shook my head. The cop put the psycho in the back of the car, people were emptying their rooms, the proprietress in her nightgown stood there aghast, the lightening flashed, the thunder roared, and the rain relentlessly pounded down.
It was mayhem
and 3 in the morning.
I looked around and saw no smoke, no flames, I asked the proprietress, “uh, where’s the fire?” She answered that she didn’t know, someone smelled smoke. I was like, for the second time, “ooookkaaaayyy…” I looked back into my room and inventoried my stuff, scattered about, and knew that the flames would have to be eminent before I went out in the rain.
As my computer continued it’s reformatting paces…
Finally, a drenched guest came back to report the smell of smoke was drifting from elsewhere.
Complete madness… Guests milling about in the rain began to reenter their rooms, the cop came back with the same report, the psycho in the back of the cop car couldn’t reach the horn, the proprietress looked at me, still aghast. I shook my head and said goodnight, closed the door, and watched my computer finish it’s paces, loaded some critical data, and went to sleep for a precious few hours thinking, “Well at least it’ll make for an interesting blog…
I hope you enjoyed it
pedal pedal
)
