It's a long story.
Before we dive into this post, let me preface it by saying that I fully realize what we did could have been a very serious, dangerous situation. And stupid. So so stupid. We did all the things single, traveling girls shouldn't do. But the whole time we both felt so right about it, like it was something we were supposed to do. That's that and this is what it is.
We picked up a couple guys. In the car rental place. In Chicago. We were about to leave but were still standing there debating about whether we were going to be honest about the extra driver or not.
We chose to be honest.
We had just walked up to the counter to sign the final rental papers when they walked in.
Rami and Scott.
There's was a long story too but essentially they were stuck in Chicago trying to get to Scott's mom's place in Indianapolis in time for the Indy 500 the next day.
Since they wanted to only rent the car one-way it was going to cost them an extra $500 on top of their rental. Indianapolis is only a 3-hour drive!
I overheard all this and thought it was crazy. That's when I started thinking...and Alisha was on the same page. We were going south...and they seemed like nice guys...and we both felt like we should offer.
So we did.
We offered them a ride. They were super grateful and all of a sudden all of these awesome things were raining on us. They kept us laughing throughout the drive with exploding licorice straws in Coke and cheesy pop sing-a-longs. Then they insisted we at least stay for dinner.
"Mom, throw a couple extra steaks on the grill, we've got two Texans coming to dinner."
We got to their house, a two-story home on the end of a hidden cul-de-sac with a heavily forested, adventurous backyard. Scott's mom was a gracious host, their St Bernard was a bear and I fell in love with her immediately, and his nieces were adorable. One swore Harry Potter and Justin Bieber were her boyfriends. (harry would win in a fight though).
(the biggest, friendliest dog you ever did meet...with the most animated of eyebrows).
Essentially, after dinner we found ourselves watching Kung-Fu Panda 2 and staying the night in their guest room.
They had offered us their extra tickets to the Indy 500 the next day. How could we pass that up??
Since we were going with "the locals" (scott's been every year since he was 6...) we got to roll up just an hour before the race with a parking spot reserved in some guy's backyard and experience this race in the midst of all the other rednecks.
It's really the only way to go.
The actual race was cool. And there was an F-16 flyover! The first 10 laps = awesome. The last 10 laps = awesome. The crashes = awesome. Everything in between wasn't quite as exciting. But Scott showed us around the museum and inner track and Rami followed along like a tickled little boy (he loves cars) and we sweated and cheered and soaked up the experience. The once in a lifetime experience because we're probably never going again.
The end came and a hike back along the railroad tracks to our Jeep (free upgrade to a Jeep!) ensued. Time to say goodbye to the guys! Rami pretty much cleaned out his wallet for us buying us lunch and car chargers and gas and such. Scott was his happy go lucky self. We were kind of sad to leave them and their crazy antics behind but ready to get back on the road to somewhere else.
They left us with some advice too.
"Now don't go picking up any more strange guys now girls, you hit a home run with us...leave it at that. No striking out!"
Pretty solid advice. It was a weird, extenuating situation we got ourselves into. And we would have dropped them off and gotten out if we ever had the slightest prompting to do so. But we never did. And it led us on a pretty fun adventure. (i am not suggesting this to anyone...do not follow our example!)
And I leave you with some footage from the track yesterday.
Have a great day :-)
2 comments:
What a fun adventure!
You're so lucky. If I'd have done that, there would have been no fiance for me to come home to!
Post a Comment