Dec. 14, 2005 - Have Gun Will Travel

I recently moved to Las Vegas -- please don't ask me where I'm from as it's a secret. It was a split-second decision to come here and may I suggest that you don't try this yourself. My life already goes by Murphy's Law so that fact alone should have forewarned me that moving hastily would cause some mayhem.

I basically left most of my belongings behind and am beginning to miss them. How does one not pack socks?? Anyway, back to my trip -- I had to travel over mountains to get here and at one point during my journey I was behind an 18-wheeler on a steep, icy grade and his tires were throwing mud onto my windshield and naturally I was out of windshield wiper fluid. As you can guess, mud and moving windshield wipers are not a good mix. My car was moving about 40 miles per hour down a steep, icy grade and I could not see a thing! Somehow I managed to get out of that mess right into another fiasco.

About an hour further into my driving, the car begins to overheat. I mean, it was really smokin' and not in a good way. Of course I was in the middle of nowhere. It took about 5 hours to get the car towed into the nearest town and the tow truck driver didn't have room for me in his truck so I had to ride IN the car ON the tow truck. That was an adventure of its own. And come to find out, the car wasn't even worth towing as the engine was ruined from the overheating.

So there I was in a small, God-forsaken town with no car -- and well, no car. And as much as it hurts me to admit it, I don't have any credit cards (I was forced to cut those up after the divorce). No credit cards pretty much means a person is shit out of luck, UNLESS you are in a small, God-forsaken town. It's as if small towns are 50 years behind the times. By some miracle, believe it or not, I managed to rent a car without a credit card, no cash up front and was back on my merry way. So now my Vegas theme song is, "Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from gettin' to you, babe".

Now is your chance to share your travel horror story...