When we were first married, we had a few years without kids so we
would often take weekend trips. One long weekend we decided to drive to
Cocoa Beach Florida to visit Mimi's Aunt Eileen, Uncle Glen and cousin Chris. We had
more free time than money so we drove, leaving immediately after work, which
seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is we worked all day,
which can be tiring and stressful, so driving through the night wasn't our best
decision.
Nevertheless, this was the plan, I took the wheel from 7pm to 2am
then turned the driving over to Mimi by then I was so tired I immediately fell
asleep. Mimi had stayed up while I was driving to keep me awake so she
was tired as well, then about 2:30am she woke me up and said she was too tired
to go on. I said "Are you kidding me, I drove for 7 hours" but
she quickly reminded me she stayed up with me. I conceded that was true,
so we then pulled over at the next rest stop to take a short nap. It
happened to be an unlit rest stop without any services basically just a bunch
of parking spaces in the middle of nowhere but we were so tired it would have
to do.
We were in a Ford Pinto, which does not have a lot of room especially
when you are carrying luggage. I got out of the car to rearrange the
luggage so we would have more room when a scruffy guy came from out of the woods, behind me and
scared the crap out of me. He was wanting some assistance but he freaked
me out so bad we immediately left. It's funny how you can go from totally
exhausted to wide awake in a nano second when you feel your life is in danger from some deranged killer. Well that's an exaggeration but it kinda felt
like that. Actually, he may have been a really nice guy that was just
happened to be roaming around unlighted rest stops at 3am, ya think! I
need to apologize if that was the case, but holy mother of God; he needs to work on his approach by
not popping out of the woods and scaring the bejesus out of people.
As we raced away from the rest stop, wide awake but not feeling
very rested, we decided to stop for some coffee, why not add caffeine to the
mix. Maybe with the fear of death and the extra caffeine we can stay up
the entire weekend. That would be special! We carried on with our
road trip without incident until we got into Florida. We were nearing our
final destination traveling on Hwy 95, which runs down the eastern coast. The
exits are 9 miles apart possibly due to our exhausted euphoric state of mind we
missed our exit. Great, so now we have to drive 9 miles to the next exit
then 9 miles back, 18 additional miles, which doesn't seem bad when you say it
fast but we we now approaching 23 hours on the road so we were not happy.
To make things worse we found that there was no exit for our stop going north
so we had to drive another 9 miles then turn around and drive 9 miles to our
exit. That's 36 additional miles for our mistake, are we being punished
for not helping the rest stop crazy.
We finally arrived, almost 24 hours, we parked, left our luggage
in the car, Glen and I would get it later and went to the condo. Just
after entering the condo, Mimi decided to go down to the car to get something
for Eileen. In the parking lot a man approached Mimi wanting her to let him in the condo
building, she refused. A code was needed to get in the building; she
was scared but was able to get in the building without being followed. After telling
us, Glen and I went down to check it out and bring the luggage up. As it
turned the guy was someone's nephew in the building so he was not another
deranged killer, that's assuming the other guy was a deranged killer.
Nevertheless that's the story I'm sticking with. The rest of the
trip was fun with much less drama, which was fine with us.
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