Miss Information takes a break
(This is Part One of one of those true life adventure story things. Part Two follows below. While it isn't correct chronologically, it just makes more sense this way.)Miss Information is still on vacation and decides to take a rest from her important work (drinking coffee and reading books) and leave town. In fact, leaving town isn’t good enough so she makes plans for a weekend excursion where she will drink coffee and read books in an entirely different country. Also, there’s gonna be shopping.
The trip gets off to a rocky start when Miss Information and her travelling companion get all chatty and distracted and miss their exit thus requiring a stupidly lengthy and annoying detour. Eventually they make it across the border—and shortly thereafter make a stupid navigational decision which Miss Information barely catches in time, preventing a second stupidly lengthy and annoying detour. She was not swift enough to prevent a short and annoying detour, however.
Some time before the end of the weekend, our heroines make it to their hotel. It has wireless high speed Internet access—which nobody employed at the hotel can tell them how to use. This marks the 4th time Miss Information has stayed someplace with wireless access and been unable to use it because the desk staff has “no idea how that works”. But whatever. Miss Information is really here for the shopping and coffee busies herself with that. Money is exchanged for goods. Coffee is consumed. All is well.
On day two, en route to more shopping and coffee drinking, our travellers watch helplessly as the tiny crack in Miss Information’s windshield (*see September 20 entry)mutates into something resembling an anaconda and crawls almost, but not quite, across the entire windshield. Miss Information had planned to get it replaced sometime. Not this soon however. Anyway, she drowns her sorrow with more shopping and additional coffee. Life is pretty good.
On day three, Miss Information notices the car making a funny noise. This is very similar to the funny noise it made last year after a big chunk of ice got stuck in the wheel well (or someplace). Even though it isn’t actually that cold, she assumes it is the same sort of thing. Ironically last year Miss Information was positive that the funny noise was a flat tire and spent ages standing around in the frigid weather carefully inspecting her tires. This time she ignores the noise and keeps driving. Obviously, when she’s at the duty free store, stuck in that no-man’s land between one country and the next, she looks down and notices, yep….that tire sure is looking a lot more pancakey than usual. You know, the new tire she just got 6 weeks ago (*see October 12 entry). Fortunately the border crossing goes smoothly and our travellers begin their search for a garage. Of course because these things never go particularly well, our hapless heroes take a wrong turn and end up on a scenic route through a national park. Miss Information does like to see important historic sites, but finds it hard to give them the reverence they deserve when her car is about to die. Eventually, they exit the park, having learned much about their native land—for instance there are no car service centres inside national parks and find an honest-to-god town. At the first corner, they see not only a gas station, but a gas station with a service centre. Their troubles are over! Except the service station is closed. In fact all the service stations in town are closed. Monday afternoon, not a holiday--some kind of tire-fixing-guy festival perhaps? Oh, well. Miss Information’s tire savvy companion puts the air back in the tire and off they go now on four doughnutty shaped tires.
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