Best laid schemes...

July 29

Every once and a while, you have a day where you are reminded that you aren’t really the one with your hands on the steering wheel of life.  I probably could have worded that more poetically, but I think you’ll understand what I mean soon enough.

This Thursday, Day Minus Two of my adventure (let’s say Thursday is -2, Friday -1, departure on Saturday day 0, arrival on Sunday day 1), fellow Swat '10 grad Travis Roothbloom came down from New Jersey to go to King’s Dominion with me for an afternoon before heading into DC for dinner with friends.  Departing at around 10:30, we planned to make it to the park by 12:30 and go straight to the Intimidator, the newest and biggest steel coaster in the park.  

Making our way along 50 West (‘the 50’, as my family would say, are we really so weird for saying that?),  we didn’t bother to slow down as we approached what  appeared to be no more than an irregularity in the pavement.  When we finally passed over it, the effect was that of hitting a speed bump at 70 mph (which is not so much as metaphor as an apt description of what actually happened).  The car jumped up, the sound of the tires on the pavement was replaced with an unsettling noise, and, to add to the chaos, the windshield wiper blades turned on.  By the time we pulled over to the shoulder a hundred yards or so down the freeway, we could easily tell from the sound that we had a flat.  

OK. At this rate this story will take forever, so I’ll speed up the pace. Travis tried to fix the flat himself, but found that his new used Toyota lacked one essential tool, the lever used to operate the jack, for replacing the tire.  Another car that had pulled over on the shoulder a small distance away from us did not, I found out, contain people fluent enough in English to understand my description of our dilemma (so much for having JET-quality communication skills).  AAA was called, and in a shorter amount of time than we anticipated (20 minutes?) we were on the road looking for a place to get a real tire.  Upon receiving advice from a policeman parked outside a Home Depot, we decided not to follow his advice at all and instead take a random exit on the 495, only to see within seconds of getting of the exit ramp a Midas car repair shop.  Killing time and hunger at the neighboring McDonald’s, we decided to change our plans and go to a much closer amusement park, Six Flags America.

As if God was giving us the proverbial thumbs up to our plan, we found a Holiday Inn as one of the other neighbors to the Midas car repair.  Picking up a brochure with directions and a 50% ticket discount coupon, we returned to the Midas waiting area, only to watch dark, ominous, severe thunderstorm clouds roll in.   

To make a long story short (too late), the rain was not too severe and let up within the hour that it started, Six Flags ended up costing us only $13 since Travis had a season pass and because we split the 50% discounted ticket for me, all the rides were closed down for almost an hour, and we successfully road all of the roller coasters in the park with almost no lines.   

True as it was that we had quite a bit of frustrating wait time that day, I don’t think I’ll really remember having to wait for AAA to come, for the car to be fixed, or for the rides to open up again at the park.  Rocketing down the first 205 ft. hill of Superman, Ride of Steel and flying in loop-de-loops on Batman ...maybe.  

Victory lap:  Making it to the new pizzeria “We the Pizza” (http://www.wethepizza.com/) in downtown DC relying only on our excellent senses of direction and within five minutes of the appointed arrival time.  

Minor upset: Not being able to buy whole pizza pies for the group because the staff were overloaded with orders.

Recovery: Still enjoying excellent pizza with Jimmy Jin, Travis, Pat, his girlfriend Jen, Chris Green, and his roommate Nathaniel Monson. We were there for a whooping three hours, but it felt like one.