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"Curtis, I want you to drive."
"Okay. Just pull in somewhere."
"Okay. Here?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." Turn. Shudder. "Shit."
We are just meters from the parking lot, stalled out, stretched across the wrong lane, with another car driving right toward us. Everything is NOT okay.
The Yaris limps to a stop in the parking lot, straddling the line that is supposed to separate one spot from another. But this is no time for precision. Mom shuts the car off and we consult the map.
The findings aren't good. Apparently "straight" is a tough directional concept for us to grasp: instead of continuing on the road through the Swords that would take us to our lodging -- a B&B in Ballyboghil -- we've unconsciously decided this village-turned-labyrinth is a fitting place to spend the rest of eternity.
Emotionally, we are a wreck. Mom is more frazzled than I've ever seen her. She's staring at the pedals and gear-shift as if they have personally offended her. My sister is shaking in the backseat, just a paper bag to the mouth away from a full-blown panic attack. I'm in the front seat talking with such forced optimism it's like I've been possessed by the spirits of Dr. Phil, Oprah, Richard Simmons, and the collective cast of Bob the Builder simultaneously.
We've been on own for half an hour.
The lot where we are parked is for a supermarket called Lidl, the same place I visited in Madrid during my semester in London.
There, on a beer run from a nearby hostel, my groupmates and I discovered perhaps the greatest of all European alcohol deals: a six-pack of Amstel 40oz.s for 3.50 euro. Needless to say, recollections of the next morning's flight have been wiped from our minds like we were exposed to a neuralizer flash.
I reflect briefly on this, wishing Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were here now to tell me this is all just a bad dream, that we didn't sign up for four more days of this, that Elvis isn't really dead, but to no avail.
Instead, Mom and I pull a Chinese fire drill in the lot and I'm suddenly faced with the task of left-hand driving, even though the instruments on the dash and gear-shift now resemble something out of Ridley Scott's Prometheus.
Mom unfurls the map(s) that sit in the passenger seat and my sister takes another deep breath to keep from turning blue as I creep out of the parking lot onto the road again.
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