Dude! Where is my car?

Lately I have been thinking about how I need to include past experiences on here before I forget them and before long posterity will not know about them. This one is hilarious.

Before moving to Caldwell, we lived in Eagle, Idaho where Jeff's parent's live. It really is about 20 minutes from here and a suburb of Boise. This entire area where I live is considered the Treasure Valley, comprising of about 7-8 cities/towns. Anyway, we lived in the country on 40 acres that were Jeff's parents. The town of Eagle used to be a total hickville type town when Jeff grew up there and I was in high school. It was mostly farms with hardly anything else. When I was in high school, they got an Albertsons and a bypass around the main part of town. They were growing. Then all of a sudden all of these rather nice neighborhoods started popping up. The houses quickly became bigger and spendier and the people in town also reflected that.

During this time, my Mazda 626 that I had since high school just died. The transmission just gave out. It got to the point where it would not get passed 1st gear. I would advance onto the rushing freeway at about 25 mph hoping and wishing that it would kick into 2nd gear real soon. Now let me tell ya, that was not cool. It died and we needed a second car.

At about that time, Jesse my brother in law was still in middle school. They had this halloween haunted house carnival thing at the school in the fall. A couple of the things being auctioned off were totally ghetto cars. Kind of funny. I would look at them and say, "Oh wow. Like no thank you." The cause I sure was good. Don't remember what it was but my best guess would be that the money went to the school. My mother in law gave Jesse mommy to buy raffle tickets for it using his name. Low and behold he won the burgundy colored Tempo with velvet like faded from the sun interior. He didn't really know how to drive but he had a car. This part is fuzzy in my head. Somehow we inherited this piece of crap. The car always felt gross and dusty.

There is where the story gets good if you are still reading. So I was at Albertsons one afternoon. The people at Albertsons there always looked great. I always looked like crap for the most part. We were constantly doing a lot of home improvements so I would show up there with paint stained pants and an old work shirt. Really who cared. So I parked my car in one of the parking spots that bordered the main thouroughfare in and out of the parking lot. The car was a stick and when I drive stick you always want to put the parking break on. You just do. Have you figured out where this is headed. So I headed in and did what I was doing. I wasn't in there very long. I got back out of the store and headed to the car. Where is the car? I swear I parked it right there. Where the &@$% is the car! I had one of those crazy moments where I felt like a crazy. I started questioning myself about where I really parked the car. Was I going off of a previous trip and where I parked? Did someone still the car!? Did I fly to the store and completely forget about that? Not long after the observation, panic started setting in. Just as worry started increasing to all time highs, I look across that large thoroughfare space to find my car not in a parking space at all but resting on a truck. Aaaagh! The car had rolled! I still laugh now at visualizing this ghetto car slowly rolling across the parking lot and resting against a super nice new silver truck. I still remember what it looked like. I still vividly remember about 3-4 people standing nearby waiting for me to come out. Waiting for the owner of this piece of crap to come claim it. Really they were stuck until someone claimed it. I wonder what they thought when they came out of the store and saw their truck pinned by the ghetto car. Thankfully nothing happened at all. It had to have rolled so slowly. We found out that the parking break did not work at all. What a piece of crap.

We ended up finding a much better car and sold this one to some slavik people for $500 or something like that. We really only had it a few months thank goodness. Talk about mortifying in an all about looks kind of town.