College Station return trip from hell

I'm going to hold off on extended posts for a mini-trip to College Station and our trip to New Jersey, I think. The day trip for a site visit in College Station was pretty funny - good group of people and some serious lunch at Rudy's BBQ (not my first visit to the College Station location, I'll have you now) which can be seen at right.

In New Jersey, I had a great dinner with my parents, saw my grandmother, supported a friend at a family funeral, pulled out a 1-1 tie on the road, and got about four hours of sleep before leaving first thing Sunday morning. I heart Jersey, but that about sums it up. Oh, I had an awesome view of NYC again and had a nice early-Saturday-morning NJ Transit ride from Hoboken-Newark-Morristown.

Definitely worth an extended post is the return trip from College Station on Wednesday after our USOC game at Texas A&M. Not the best time I've ever had.

After an extra time loss and all the usual post-game site maintenance, I was set to ride back with Farnold (with a couple of spare pizzas in hand, mind you) to make sure he stayed awake on the drive.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Farnold's tire pressure light came on, a problem with which he seemed familiar, so we pulled into a gas station to take care of it. Naturally, we picked a gas station with no obvious air pump, but we stopped anyway to get gas and see if the attendant knew of a nearby station with an air pump. Farnold made conversation with the attendant and an Aggie, the latter of whom ended up giving us 75 cents for air, even though we had it in the car. Nice guy.

Anyway, we drove down two or three blocks to a different station and pulled in, but there was a truck at the air pump. So we sat, and Farnold spilled a can of Red Bull in his cup holders and sopped it up with napkins. All the while, this guy remained crouched behind the truck by the front wheel, inflating away. A couple of times he got up, took a few steps backward in his T-shirt, Aggie basketball shorts, and flip-flops, and eyed the tires critically as if to gauge his progress. It took forever.

So he finally finished, and we made fun of him for wearing basketball shorts with no pockets while driving around, and we waited for him to leave. Before he did, a sedan turned in and drove between us as if to exit the station. Then the truck drove off right through our route, and before Farnold could accelerate, the sedan had U-turned into the spot at the air pump. We were both so stunned we didn't even know how to react. We kind of looked at each other with a "Did that just happen?" expression. I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, but it was just so bizarre that we had been so frustrated to wait on this guy but ended up getting beaten to the spot.

Instead of going all Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes on the car, we drove off and found another station, where Farnold put on a serious display of re-inflating tires in short order. What are you gonna do? Things seemed to go OK from there. We drove off down Highway 6, making up one-liners for our night (Forever Aggie, queue-cutter girls), snacking on cold pizza. Farnold even got permission to come in late the next day!

Then, just as we approached Navasota, the 'check engine' light flickered on Farnold's dashboard. So we pulled over, Farnold riffled through the manual a bit, and then he tried to restart the car to see if t he light would go away. No dice, no acceleration, and pretty soon a fading battery. This is where it became not cool.

BOTH of Farnold's phones were all but dead, so I called AAA, which I have, and they said they would send a tow to arrive in in the next hour. As we sat there, waiting for the tow truck to arrive, we (a) tried to explain our position to the AAA operator and tow truck driver on multiple occasions, (b) watched each car on the highway to assess whether it was a tow truck, (c) reacted to new indicator lights on the dashboard, (d) watched our lights - overhead, side-view mirror, hazards, brakelights, headlights, and dashboard - gradually dim and expire, (e) debated how much to tip a tow truck driver for a free 100-mile tow, and (f) shared some gallows humor. Good times. Finally, just as we felt like we had seen three tow trucks go by, and surely one must be ours, the headlights went out and we were all but invisible.

Fortunately, that is exactly when the tow truck driver arrived, and we figured it would be relatively simple from there. It was, mostly, but first the mechanic and Farnold had to figure out how to tow the car, which was no simple task and involved getting a tow-hook out of the trunk, which was virtually inaccessible because the trunk wouldn't open (no power, remember) and internal access was limited due to all the crap the car was carrying. We had been coming from an event, after all.

Eventually we got the tow-hook and let the driver do his thing before settling in for the long haul. I dozed in and out a little bit while Farnold made some conversation. Even after we got home and pushed the car into a parking spot at our apartment complex, Farnold still had to run me - in another car, of course - back to our work parking lot so I could drive home. 2:45 a.m. Awesome.

At any rate, frustrating and tiring as it was, it could have been worse, and I'm only a little worse for wear today.