This past Sunday we had our long-awaited planning meeting for all of the folks who are running the Medoc marathon with us in September. Why a planning meeting, you may wonder? Well, we have to coordinate our costumes, of course! See, almost everybody who runs the Medoc marathon runs in a costume. Some time ago we came up with what we thought was a brilliant plan for costumes, and the initial reaction was very positive. The closer it came to D-Day, however, the more foot-dragging went on. What sort of costume could elicit such a reaction? Playboy Bunny costumes, what else! Yes, men and women will be dressed as Playboy Bunnies. Pretty good, huh? Chuck actually paved the way for this idea back in 2002. His brave precedent-setting costume inspired us to do the same for Medoc. But like I said, there has been some significant back-pedaling as the date has approached. So Sunday we were going to have a little Come to Jesus dinner and decide just how brave everybody was really willing to be.

We decided to carpool up to our friends Mary and Gerry’s house with Skip and Diane who live quite close to us. And Skip volunteered to drive. Nice! We all piled into their Honda Odyssey and set out on the 45-minute drive to Mary and Gerry’s house. The weather being quite warm, we had the air-conditioner on. About 15 or 20 minutes into the drive, as we neared downtown Los Angeles on Interstate 5, we noticed that the air-conditioning was not doing its thing. At all. The Skip noticed a light on the dashboard come on. Then another. Then the brake lights came on. Then the speedometer and tachometer plummeted to zero. About this time we decided to get off the freeway, and elected the Union Station off-ramp. No sooner did we turn into the drive to Union Station than the car stalled completely. We pushed it into a parking spot (after nearly being killed by some idiot who decided to careen around us and get into the parking lot ahead of us – apparently the sight of three people pushing a car didn’t strike them as reason to slow down and wait). The car was dead. To paraphrase Monty Python, the Odyssey had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.

My first thought was to call AAA, as Chuck and I have AAA Premier (we upgraded after the motorcycle ran out of gas on Interstate 5 at the bottom of the grapevine – but that’s another story). I called and was about mid-way through negotiating the whole deal, when Skip remembered their Honda Care plan included towing, etc. So I said good-bye to AAA, and he called Honda Care. They said they’d send a tow truck out and the tow truck would tow the Odyssey to a Honda dealer. Sometime. Maybe that day, even. So we cooled our heels for a bit, then remembered we had two bottles of wine in the car that we were taking to Mary and Gerry’s. Hey! Why sit around in the heat being sad when we could uncork a bottle and enjoy ourselves! It’s not like were going to be driving anywhere! But we had no cups. No problem! Chuck and I went into Union Station and bought four Styrofoam cups for a dollar. Then we took out one of the bottles and looked expectantly at the Travel King himself (that would be Skip, renowned for his cross-country marathon drives) and asked him for a corkscrew. He went in the back of the Odyssey and pulled out enough tools to build a small house, but alas, no corkscrew. And not a single Swiss Army knife to be found among the lot of us. The ever resourceful Chuck attempted to open the bottle using a screwdriver and only succeeded in getting grease on the cork.

Meanwhile, there was no tow truck driver. Skip called the Honda Care people (again) and they said they’d get in touch with the tow truck folks and see what was going on. It was now closing in on 6pm on a Sunday and we were pondering the likelihood of ANY Honda dealer being open after 6pm when the Honda Care people called back and said that the tow truck people had been delayed, but would be there in twenty minutes. We called our young friend Meagan (who was also coming to dinner as she is our official translator as she speaks fluent French) to see if she would come and pick us up at Union Station and follow the tow truck over to the dealer so we could all then go over to Mary and Gerry’s. She was game and told us she’d be there in a few minutes. And we continued to wait. And wait. Meagan arrived, and still we waited. Finally Honda Care called back to say that the Honda dealer’s was now closed so no tow truck would be forthcoming. Hmmm. At that point I did what I should have done almost two hours before, and called AAA back. They dispatched a tow truck, and within 15 minutes it arrived –a big ass flatbed tow truck. Now the Odyssey (which, I should add, has an automatic transmission) was really, truly dead so the next challenge was how to get it on the flatbed. The tow truck driver (who was also a really savvy mechanic) figured out that he could jump the battery enough to get the car into Neutral, and it could then be backed out of the parking spot we had pushed it into lo, those many hours before, and then it could be pulled onto the flatbed. So Skip gets in the car, and the tow truck drive gets the jumper cables in place. The Odyssey starts, yay! We all give a thumbs-up! We’re finally going to be able to leave Union Station! Skip puts it in Neutral, and we all push it back and get it in place to be pulled onto the flatbed. The driver gives Skip the okay, and Skip puts his foot on the brake, and then – wait for it – puts the car into Park. Argh!!! The tow truck driver had to back around again, jump the car again, and Skip had to start it up long enough to put it in Neutral again. This time it all worked, and the car got on the flatbed, and finally at about 7:30pm we were able to leave Union Station and go to Mary and Gerry’s.

Lessons learned: 1) always keep a corkscrew in the car, and…nope, that was really the only lesson learned.