Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Kalama-what!?

Well here's a line I really never expected to type. I'm sitting in a car in Kalamazoo, Michigan! So, as you can probably guess, I did it.

I think I was right - Kate did think I was nuts. I called her room and woke her up. She briefly sounded really cold and angry. I figured I had really blown it, but to her credit as she woke up it got bit better.

"What!?" she said. "Who is this?" How quickly they forget. I guess I'm not the most memorable guy. I tried again. "I know this sounds crazy," I said to her, "But that thing..." I was about to lead into the space station, and lights in the sky and everything as I had discovered it. But I realized it was 4 am or thereabouts and this was going to sound extra crazy. Start with something more easy to get your head around, I thought. So I said "I think they're going to cancel all the planes shortly and we're going to be stuck in Chicago. I think if we were to go to that rental car place across the street we could get a car and drive back into Canada and not get stranded here. I know this sounds a bit crazy, but if this thing," I quickly skirted the explanation of the thing for now, "if this thing is as big as it looks in Europe, I wouldn't be suprised if they crank up security at the border and stuff too."

I paused to let her get her breath. I briefly thought of her sitting on her bedside in something slinky, but thought it best to move on. "Kate, I know this sounds crazy, but If there's something really weird going on, the last place I want to be is a couple of thousand klicks away from home and in another country."

"Umm. Yeah - I hear you." A big sign that seemed to say oh, crap, why is he bugging me with this.

"So anyway," I went on, fuguring I should bail out here and hope my insanity didn't get around the office back home. "Anyway, I'm sorry I bugged you so early, but I figure I'm going to go and do this, and I figured, you know you'd wonder what the hell happened if I suddenly didn't show up for our flight later this morning. So anyway I'll let you go and..."

But she jumped in there sounding all awake and motivated suddenly.

"Shit - you know, you might not be so crazy. Umm. Give me five minutes. I'm going to look like hell, but I want to come along too. No, it's okay, I appreciate that you called and everything. I do want to go too. Let's do it. See you in the lobby." and that was it!

She hung up and we met downstairs, paid a bored desk guy and popped across the street and rented a car. We were going to ask about one-way rentals, but we figured then, lets just rent it and drop it off at the same company back home and play dumb. We'd rather get penalized than find out the guy won't rent to us.

So anyway, that was about 3 hours ago. The highway was pretty good for a while. Still not too bad I guess. There is a lot of traffic headed into Lansing Michigan direction I think. We've been driving on I94, listening to the radio.

I've got driving duty, but we said we'd switch after a few hours. The initial adrenaline is wearing off. We've pulled over into downtown Kalamazoo. I have to hand it to Kate. She could be playing this like "what sort of crazy thing have you got me into." But she seems to be almost laughing it off. A couple of times she's said - we must be crazy - oh well - I'm sure the company will laugh at us, but cover the cost anyway.

Kalamazoo isn't as tiny as I thought it would be. Some nice old buildings here. It's just after 8am and people are up and scurrying around. I have no idea what people do here. The radio is pretty much not saying a lot. The news at 8:00 just as we pulled in here mentioned a short story about some air travel being disrupted in Europe and some strange lights in the sky, but they're reporting it like it's a quirky UFO story and moving on to baseball scores like it's ordinary. The European news sites seemed to be much more serious.

Oh well. We were going to stop for a sit-down breakfast, but we're still not sure what to think. So we agreed, lets not dawdle. Let's get something to go and move on at least to the border quickly.

Kate's making a call and going to the ladies inside, and I'm sitting here trying to avoid digging into these egg and bacon sandwiches that are smelling up the car. Man I'm hungry.

I got online with this awesome 3G card and see things are still going wacky in Europe. Flights are suspended across the continent. Borders are slow from the EU into other countries they say - so maybe we're doing the right thing.

This is so surreal - why is it going crazy over there and nothing much is happening here. Well I see a few of the web sites for the big news channels are showing pictures of weird lights alright, but the story still has a different spin on it. They are reporting that airports are messed up due to flight cancellations to Europe, but otherwise they claim flights are on still.

Oh well, more news on the radio soon - oh and here comes Kate. We're almost ready to roll, and man I'm hungry too!

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