Red Truck Road Trip – EAST Coast Team

Fortunately for me, I am traveling with two gentlemen and have been slightly catered in the sense that I am use to the separate room. They share a double and I get a single, which usually results in a king size bed. I’ve never slept in a bed so large; I think I can get lost in one, and I sadly like the fact that I can toss a purse, notebook, ipod and book on one end and fall asleep in the same bed without ever reaching those items. Anyway, I have had a fairly princess-esq experience so far, which I feel slightly guilty about and even worse as I explain our Memphis folly.

The Memphis Folly . . .

Due to my stupidity and the storm, for fifteen minutes, I thought the comfort level was going to be erased. After staying a few nights in major cities, we wanted to get away from the prices. One night in Memphis, we decided to stay outside the city so that we can each get a separate room to do work and save some dough. We selected a place near an airport. I’m usually a heavy sleeper. I know people fly in the evening, but I can sleep through anything. Or so I thought . . .

Zoom, a plane rushes overhead. It is midnight, must be their red eyes. Zoom – Zoom – Zoom. The room shakes and jangles, Zoom, thirty planes follow it in the hour. Who knew Memphis was such a hot spot?

It is now 1:00 A.M. Planes do not fly all night, Andrea says to me on the phone; her sister is a flight attendant. Sweet dreams, Andrea, I need to sleep. Wait, Zoom – Zoom– Zoom.

Check the floor for falling debris; it’s 2:00 A.M., and I really need my rest. We’ve been non-stop since the 2^nd; planes do not fly all night, I repeat to myself. The TV wobbles, Zoom, as if I am under attack. Twenty to thirty more rattles from take off and they seem to kiss the top of my room directly.

Then, it turns 3:00. I wait. 3:10 A.M., finally, sleep.

Zoom – Zoom – Zoom. Wake up! Zoom – Zoom – Zoom – Good morning, Sunshine. It’s 6:00 A.M., you had three hours, and the planes need to go!

My thoughts are a cloud and my head is a blur. I place the cover over my ears and then begin the intruding fantasizing. I wonder about the number of people who slept in the same bed as I. I create stories in my head about these people that have touched the same comforter. Yuck, I have it near my face, I don’t know these people; I kill myself with my own thoughts.

After my vision of gross, I want a shower to feel clean. Brown water spits out of the faucet. I rub my eyes. Yup, brown, in slow trickles. Eventually, the water turns clear, but still trickles slow.

I shower, pack, and pace. My body is fighting with me for more sleep. Obviously, it’s deaf because we’re sitting on the runway and it’s time for another thirty to zoom into the air.

At 10:30 A.M., I go to Bill’s room and grab the keys. It’s time to pack the car and head to the Gibson Guitar factory tour and get away from this landing strip. It’s raining, a reasonable, steady rain. I throw my suitcase into the car along with some of my travel bags. I leave the trunk open for Bill to toss in his stuff while I go to Dan’s room and knock on his door to make sure he’s getting ready to jet. I return back to Bill’s room and he shows me his latest piece. We talk for a bit and then I work on my computer while he finalizes some touch ups. Dan comes down to Bill’s room, looking for the car keys to load his stuff. The car keys. 

I check my pockets. Then I look on the table beside me. I bang my pockets again; front ones, back ones, side ones – I don’t have side ones. The keys? I just had the keys.

Now, it begins to pour, the heaviest rain that I’ve seen all trip. I play rewind in my personal VCR and the damn thing gets stuck. I don’t remember what I did with the stupid keys. I unlocked the back door, put in my stuff, and . . . ? And?

“Where are the keys, Michelle?” Dan asks again.

“I don’t know. I may have left them in the car.”

“Okay,” he says with the same uncertainty I said in my previous response. “I’m going to bring down my stuff.”

I race to the car and the rain bounces off my body. The tempo escalates and the rain begins to come in at an angle. It’s whipping and hard to see. The puddle at my feet grows past my ankles. Dan jokes while he brings down his bags. He usually makes me laugh, but at that moment, I can’t. He continues to try and alleviate the situation with humor and I get more nervous as the search continues. I think of the meltdown in Little Miss Sunshine and aggravate myself because everything isn’t a movie. But then I think about it again and realize that there could be a meltdown of that sort in any second.

I wipe my nose into my shoulder to take off some of the rain. Then, I continue to move my pieces of luggage. No luck. I go through each car door side. No luck.

“Maybe I left them in the door and somebody took them,” I say.

“Michelle, why wouldn’t they take the car?” Dan replies.

Dan drops his stuff in Bill’s room and searches the area. Bill comes outside and looks in the car with me. I begin looking underneath the car, digging through the puddles. Maybe I dropped the keys? Maybe they’re floating in the mini-river that this storm is producing? I still visualize someone sitting in their room, watching me dig and laugh with the keys spinning around their index finger. Jerks, I think. Then, I wonder, did I give them to Bill?

“Bill, did I give you the keys?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. He checks his pockets and I think of our absent-minded moments that we have already shared.  He takes out his hand from his last pocket and produces nothing.  He looks at me with an eye that relates and we continue the scavenger hunt.

I stand up again and look in the same pocket in the backseat driver’s side, the one I looked in twenty times already. The rain keeps coming down in a rapid pace. Bill is diagonal to me in the passenger’s side going through the glove compartment. With all the sweetness and seriousness, he hands me the umbrella he found on the side door.

“Do you need this?”

I’m soaked, dripping, standing into a puddle that is now beyond my ankles and crashing up to the cuffs of my Capri’s. If this was a movie, we would have freeze-framed. I couldn’t believe he asked me this, but at the same time it was so kind. I look into his eyes and smirk; it was really the nicest and most genuine question.

“I’m all-set.”

Then, I continue to search. “Maybe I left it in my room,” I tell Bill.

“Okay, I’ll go look with Dan.”

I race upstairs to my sleepless pit and begin turning over pillows, tossing old bed sheets and towels around the room. I flick on the light a thousand times and look underneath the lamp. I open draws that I never touched. I look in the refrigerator. Why? I don’t know. But I did. Then, in defeat, I head towards the door, and in my somber stroll, I hear the most glorious sound.

Dan yells, “Michelle, we found them.”

They were on the floor near a bag. Did I place them there or did they drop? It doesn’t matter. But there are now new rules.

1) Search all dry places first.

2) Dan holds the keys.