One Surreal Day
Trip Start
Dec 13, 2007
1
8
Trip End
Dec 29, 2007
Anchorage, Alaska
Friday, December 28, 2007
My turn didn't go as well. The adventure started out in the parking garage early in the morning. I hadn't really been driving much. Combine that fact with one blind eye (no depth perception) and a narrower than usual parking gargage and you get a fender bender. Blah! Not a good start to the day for sure. I didn't realize I had backed into another car. Some lady was yelling at me to look. Precisely in the middle of this accident I get a call from work. I don't recoginze my co-worker on the phone at first or what he is trying to ask me. Essentially he is telling me I HAVE to work a 12 hour shift on the night of my wedding anniversary because there is no one else. When I got out of the car I saw that my rental car had a nice grapefruit size indentation in the bumper. Luckily the other vehicle had nary a scratch on it...small miracles. I spent half the drive just beating myself up mentally over the incident when I got a brainstorm. I asked someone for a recommendation for a body shop which one of the locals in Eagle Creek was quick to provide. I called the guy and he agreed to give me an estimate. My thinking was if it was cheaper than our insurance deductible that had to be much better. Also, I have no idea what the car rental agency would charge when they saw the dent. When I pull into the guy's body shop I immediately get stuck in the ditch. Great! Can this day get worse? 4 guys come out of the body shop with a pack of their hounds (what is it about Alaskans and dogs??!). They push me to the road and we start again. The owner looks at my dent and muses for a bit. I rapidly explain my logic about trying to stay under the deductible and just fix it myself if the price is right. When he hears that he blurts out $100 to fix it. I guess the deductible explanation was his cue for what to charge. He goes on and on about how it will take 2 hours and maybe I should just go wait at the nearby coffee shop while they are doing the repair. I agree to the price but I dunno some little instinct just kicks in and I opt to wait at the body shop. 15 minutes later after what looks like some heavy blow drying (turns out to be a heat gun) the mechanic reaches up and just pops the dent back into place. I look at Rick the owner and say "2 hours?" He says how about $50 instead? Jeez..anyway so I leave the body shop much happier. I feel like maybe I've saved myself hundreds of dollars by fixing it before the rental agency can lock eyes on it but who knows.
Our Garmin GPS doesn't seem to understand Alaska particularly Palmer especially well. As usual she misses the cue for me to turn off. Clever me decides to slow down and illegally cross the snow and ice covered median to get to the exit anyway. As it turns out I completely cut off an Alaskan police man in his cruiser. I'm telling you the blind eye thing is killer! Of course he pulled me over and he was ticked! He says "Do you realize if I weren't paying attention and on the ball you would have run me off the road?" I'm like "uh...uh... sorry." I hand him my Texas driver's license. "Texas," he says with a tone of "that figures." He asks me what I'm doing in Alaska at the WRONG time of the year. He makes a point of telling me I'm up here at the wrong time. I babble on about dog sitting and wanting a White Christmas and then promptly burst into tears. At this point I'm so totally stressed by all the events within a span of an hour and of course the dogs are still waiting to be fed and walked after being on the deck all night. He says "I don't handle crying so stop crying." Then he gets a less angry expression on his face and says "Look just take a moment and maybe say a prayer...calm down but please be careful from now on." He speeds off without giving me a ticket which I would have deserved. More small miracles. It is easy to get upset over these little things in life but any fellow travelers reading this - even this kind of stuff is all part of the adventure. Stay safe and obey the rules of the road. When little things like happen remember it could be much worse.
