If this is the first post you are reading, please start HERE to read the beginning of this story.
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting the ending to my cliff hanger, I apologize for disappearing. I’ve been traveling all week for work and I just couldn’t find time to fit in blogging!
Anyhow, when I last left you, our protagonist (also known as hubby) was grumbling incessantly about having to “pay money to cook his own dinner”. For some reason he wasn’t able to see the value in spending quality time with his loving wife while learning a valuable lesson in the kitchen (this is probably because avoids the kitchen at all costs and, driving over an hour in rush-hour doesn’t necessarily make cooking your own dinner any more palatable!)
Anyhow, we started our cooking experience with a group of 26 other people. We had assumed that each couple would get their own station to learn how to cook each course but alas, that was a silly assumption! We cooked together as a class, which basically means that 6 overly aggressive people in the class did all the prep & cooking and the rest of us craned our necks to see what was going into the pan. Hubby was assigned the exciting task of crushing walnuts for dessert (a task that he obviously needed to travel NY to master). All-in-all this was a successful nut crushing experience (come on – I just had to go there!) and we did in fact enjoy a tasty dinner. Now, given that our dinner was successful and ended around 10:00pm, you’d probably think that we were approaching the end of an enjoyable and relaxing evening. We had survived the drive into the city, we had learned how to mould dough and bake pear crustatas and we were headed off to find a nice place to have a cocktail with our friends before we set out for our hour drive home.
But, as they say, be careful of making assumptions too quickly. Because what seemed like an enjoyable end to our evening was about to take a turn……
We settled into seats at new bar in Bryant Park. Hubby asks what sort of smoky scotches they have (you may remember, that hubby likes his scotch!) and the waitress looks at him as if he’d asked her how much it cost to build the Empire State Building. So, hubby follows her to the bar to speak directly to the bartender whose only additional knowledge comes in the form of pointing to bottles on the back bar. So, after hubby noses a few bottles, he finds one he likes, and asks the bartender how much. When he settles back at our table hubby declares that he just selected a $21 glass of scotch. Now, hubby’s had an incredibly crappy month, he’s put up with my NYC cooking excursion and if he wants a $21 glass of scotch then so be it! Except of course, the moron bartender didn’t actually tell him how much the scotch was at all. But, we don’t find this out until we get our bill which shows that hubby ordered a whopping $55 a glass scotch…. Apparently it was a 21 year old scotch.. NOT a $21 scotch!!
Now maybe it was at this point, that we should have realized our relaxing night was about to take a rapid turn down a dark road, but we were naïve as we paid our astronomical bill and went on our merry way.
As we start this story, it’s about 11:30pm and I’ll try to take you through the next 6 hours of our night the best I can (yes, I did say SIX hours….)
11:30 – we return to pick up our car from the parking garage
11:45 – we’ve successfully made it out of the Lincoln tunnel without any major traffic issues
11:46 – we hit some major traffic issues (cars are literally not moving through the toll plaza to get onto the NJ Tpke)
11:50 – we still haven’t moved
11:55 – we change the radio station to find out what the heck is going on (we hear that all lanes are merging down to one lane at some point – that we can’t currently see – after the toll plaza)
12:00 – since we’ve still only moved about 10 feet, we decide to give up and cut across the traffic and to turn around and take a completely different route home
12:15 – we start to hear some really odd rattling in the car
12:20 – rattling is getting worse
12:30 – hubby’s getting cranky
12:35 – rattling is getting worse
It’s at the point in the story that I should mention that the car we are driving is a leased car, only a year old and has about 10,000 miles…. In other words: It should NOT be rattling.
12:55 – our car breaks down on the side of the road… on a bridge…. with no shoulder (bad, but only be beginning of how bad our night was about the get!)
12:56 – I pull out my cell phone to call AAA….. only to find that the battery is dead. So, I say to hubby “hon, I need your phone, mine is dead”. Hubby replies “well, that’s fantastic ‘cause my battery is dead too”
12:57 – And, it’s about now that I think my awfulizer hubby is going to have his own breakdown
12:58 – hubby is now out of the car, on the side of the road, leaning against the guard rail. The hood of the car is open and we are wondering what we’re going to do since we can’t call anyone, and there’s really no place to walk to get help. So, we wait and hubby stews……
1:20ish – a cop finally pulls up behind us.
1:21 – he comes on his PA system and yells at hubby to “get back in the car”. He then yells at us to “move your car off the bridge”. Uhmmm…. Ok, asshole, don’t you think we would have moved the car if we could???. Then, this ever-so-pleasant police officer, pushes our car about ½ a mile onto a shoulder, tells us a tow truck is on the way and drives off.
1:45 – tow truck arrives but since it’s a NJ Parkway tow truck he can only tow us off the next exit, not all the way home.
2:15 – we are deposited in the parking lot of a 24 hour grocery store and the tow truck guy lets me borrow his phone to call AAA.
2:20 – AAA tells us that it will be about an hour before the tow truck can get to us (I should also probably mention that we are still about 45 minutes from where we live)
2:21 – hubby hears that we’re still an hour away from getting any help and the furrow in his brow deepens……..(this is a bit of an understatement, but I’m not sure I can do appropriate justice to his reaction without a camera – and, I’m not so sure it was the appropriate time to say “honey, lemme get a picture for the blog”)
2:25 – we go into the grocery store to use the rest room and to try to find an emergency charger for the phone
2:35 – we are now back in the car (it’s freezing outside – and we can’t turn it on) and I call AAA back to let them know that my phone is back on, in case they need to contact me
2:37 – AAA so pleasantly tells me, that the tow truck guy apparently came to the parking lot while we were in the store and he couldn’t find us. And, since they didn’t have any way to contact us, he’d moved onto his next job.
WTF – We were in the store for 10 minutes – We were told it would take him an hour – AND – there are only 10 friggin’ cars in the parking lot. WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE COULDN’T FIND OUR CAR????
2:38 – we are basically told that since he took another job we have to wait at least ANOTHER hour for him to come back.
Did I mention that it’s about 35 degrees outside and we can’t turn on the car????
And, if my last description of hubby’s furrowed brow was an understatement, I’m not even sure where to begin to describe his reaction to this new news!
Let’s just say, he got out of the car for a few minutes of private time………………….
3:00 – hubby hasn’t actually said anything for about 30 minutes and it looks like his head could possibly explode (and I don’t mean the kind of explosion that could come from me over-talking. This explosion would more likely come from a boiling over of emotions that had begun to make steam seep from his ears…..)
4:00ish – We get a call – on my newly charged cell phone – that tow truck guy is on his way back to us
5:00 – we are finally pulling into our driveway
5:01 – I’m forking over $170 to the tow truck guy to put the finishing touches on our fun-filled cooking excursion to NYC
We are cranky, miserable and just plain exhausted as we finally climb into bed ….
Needless to say, I think I did actually learn a few lessons from this relaxing, fun, enjoyable, nightmarish evening in NY with friends.
- Things can indeed get worse…
- If you’re having a rough month and living under a dark cloud, it will indeed follow you to another state
- You should never, ever leave the house without a cell phone charger
And perhaps the most important learning….
Maybe, just maybe, Hubby will go to any lengths possible to try to ensure that he’s never again asked to cook dinner………………..
