EsCARgot

Found this gem while cleaning my desktop:

sometimes always when you escape something bad, something else comes to find you.

there is more than one reason why i should be suffering from swine flu right now. i'm not. clutch. but instead, the fates decided our car should die on the middle of the highway in france only 45 minutes away from home. after driving in traffic for 5 hours.

so.

everyone is fighting and i'm just trying to sleep it off, but we somehow manage to find an SOS phone after we've veered off the highway. we call for help. 30 minutes of eating all the food in our car later (survival strategy), the truck appears. towtrucks here are WAY sweeter. the cabin fits at least 6 people legally - classy. on our way to the place where dead cars go (not heaven), we pick up another towtruck driver (why? doesn't he have a truck?) and some smelly french woman. stereotypes aside, she smelled like she was at least 50 years past her due date. and she was only middle-aged.

she sits next to me.

we go to rusty car central, and i don't know what's going on because i don't know any car words in french. so instead i stand outside in the bitter cold (i swear the temperature dropped 2 degrees specifically for this occasion) and watch my little sisters have teddy bear battles in the parking lot. probably shouldn't have let them play there, but the coast looked clear.

i decide to go inside and see what's going on. olivia comes and spills a stack of papers everywhere. guess she's my sister after all.

then i realize the towtruck driver we picked up is actually a real person and the husband of ms. smelly. he's talking to the guy at the desk and here's a picture to prove it:

so i guess it's mr. and ms. crack now. but ms. crack gets all of this sandwich stuff out of her car. a baguette, meat, cheese, mustard, and lays it out in this common area place. i am eating bacon chips from england. i'm fascinated that they have all of these supplies on hand. but they are not eating any of it. so i get bored and leave.

back to past tense now?

i come outside to find my dad having a serious heart to heart with mr. crack. they are circling the lot together. then my stepmom tells me not to ever trust men. wise.

we are stranded. the french cracks give us some apricots. i guess their car broke down because it was actually a farm.

still no one has eaten that baguette. i'll spoil the end of the story for you - they never eat it.

Finally, another towtruck comes and he drives us all the way back to switzerland. But it is illegal for him to be in switzerland past midnight, so we are crunched for time.

Wait - illegal?

We park our car in the middle of the road when we get there because parking is a vicious cycle in geneva. We almost towed someone so we could have a spot, but the guy was gonna turn into a pumpkin if he did not leave.

Prime example of quick escalation - a nine hour journey that ended with a lot of wine.

and then the next morning we found out that

OUR CAR HAD EXPLODED IN A FREAK GASOLINE ACCIDENT!!!!!!!!!!