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The story of a road trip
16 years ago
This is the beginning.
This is the story of a road-trip-gone-wrong-gone-wrong-er. It is a story about people, and about the love that truly makes the world go ‘round; the kind of love we can only feel from God.
Monday before Thanksgiving, 2009, Sara and I hit the road for a 900 mile road trip from Denver to Boise. Unlike the precisely similar road trips we had already been taking for the last two years, this one was not joyous or exciting. Instead, it was stressful, and bitter: At the end of the week, I would be going home to Denver but Sara would not. Naturally, since she was moving, she was bringing her life with her, which needed more cargo space than a 1994 2-door Honda Celica.
At first the thought was to rent a moving truck big enough to tow her car on a dolly, which was a fairly expensive thing to try to do, so after a bit of trusty internet research, the thought was to bump the cost down to a smaller trailer, fit everything inside that, and tow the trailer with the Celica.
Between the 5’ x 8’ U-haul and the cargo space of the car, everything fit. Barely. Now up to this point, Sara had been in a fit of nerves about the trip, and I had been wearing my strong-face to try to raise her spirits, so already we had red-flag #1 on our list of reasons why this trip wasn’t going to be easy: Intuition. Red Flag #2 was more of a big celestial tap on the shoulder: Ice. Upon leaving for our soon-to-be-infamous road trip, it took about five minutes just to get on the road, as the car/trailer combo had been parked ontop of a giant sheet of slick ice, and every attempt at traction was met the sound of spinning wheels.
What a stressful way to start a trip. So with blood-pressure already spiking, we were on our way, and finally things seemed to be going okay! We put on our newest audio book and drove north out of Colorado without a problem at all. Four or five miles before the Wyoming border, the freeway starts climbing upwards; shallow hill after shallow hill, never downhill but the occasional straightaway gave us time to catch our breath for the next uphill. By this point, we had discovered Red Flag #3: HILLS!
Even an expert driver like Sara can’t make an old manual transmission enjoy towing an entire apartments worth of stuff up thousands of feet worth of hilly, windy Wyoming freeway, and about a mile over the border, things took a nose-dive for road trip hell. First, the car wouldn’t go any faster than 50, then after a brief moment pulled to the side of the road, the car wouldn’t go faster than 10! Almost immediately we smelled burning rubber, and the meters told Sara that her car was overheating.
Just like that, the road-trip came to an end just two hours after we had started. Pulling over to the side of the road, thus began the phone calls to AAA, and the real adventure.
Our tow-truck driver’s name was Steve, a very round, very friendly fellow who recognized that we had absolutely no idea about what to do or where to go. He wanted to save us some money on overage, so instead of taking us to the nearest AAA certified car shop, he made a few calls to his personal mechanics’ personal phones. The first was closing shop for the day, but the second was happy to take a look. Onward in Steve’s truck towing Sara’s car towing Sara’s stuff, we drove for about fifteen minutes, then headed down a little dirt road, and up the dirt driveway to a shop/garage/barnyard/house. This tucked-away establishment belonged to a self-employed mechanic named Rick Patches, who just might be the nicest man in all of Wyoming.
I should probably mention that by this point, we had been told two or three times already that it was the coldest day of the month, and the bone-chilling relentless winds did not disagree.
Standing in the cold with our hands in our pockets looking more out of place than the crooked-necked goat who wandered up to us, Sara and I watched Steve drive off just in time to get the news: The car wasn’t going anywhere. The flywheel had been stripped, and the clutch was burnt out. Hello $800 mechanics bill. Hello stranded, hopeless feeling!
Rick Patches is a gruff looking fellow with fingers as thick as lug-nuts and skin dyed red with 35 years of motor-oil. His voice sounds a bit like rubbing two bags of gravel together, but no matter what he said to Sara and I in those first uncomfortable minutes, it sounded something like “Oh I’ve been there, don’t you worry.” He invited us into his home, about a ten second walk away from his shop, where we had the opportunity to warm up, drink coffee, admire the outlandish log-cabin feel of the home of this sportsman, and brainstorm ideas.
By brainstorm ideas, I mean to imply that Sara and I sat in stupefied silence as Rick suggested what to do next. The obvious choice was to rent a bigger U-haul and a dolly big enough to tow Sara’s car, transfer all of the belongings, and drive on. When it became a likely scenario that a dolly was nowhere nearby, the second option was to leave the car at a shop until the repairs could be finished, then come back to Cheyenne to get it.
Fingering through his phone-book trying to get a hold of his friend at U-haul, Rick came up with an even easier idea. One that would save time and money: put the Celica in the back of a really big U-haul, and drive it all at once without even needing to rent a dolly.
Uneasy, nervous agreement from Sara and I. No mister Patches that doesn’t sound impossible at all… We lift cars four feet off the ground every day! We went to U-haul, got the massive 23’ truck, and ultimately followed Rick (in our massive truck) to a nearby motel, where we briefly discussed our plans for the morning, and parted ways.
We hadn’t eaten since ten that morning, and now it was 7 at night. Putting the minimal necessities into our room, we turned on the heat, and went back to the office to take the motel clerk up on her offer to drive us to the Shari’s across the street. After a very tasty and very satisfying meal we walked back to our room, and discovered that the heater was more of a noise-maker than a heater. Did I mention it was the coldest day of the month?
One miserable night’s sleep and eight hours later, it was time to wake up. Freezing, depressed, more than a little ill with stress, we checked out of our room, and headed back to Uncle Rick’s shop. Backing a 23’ cargo truck two property-lengths down a dirty road does wonders to add to the fantasy that you are a trucker, if only for a day.
Now, the night before, Rick had told us that he was going to bring some friends from Doug’s Tow company (of which Steve-the-jolly was an employee), who had the machines capable of putting a car into a truck. When we arrived on Tuesday morning, we discovered that Rick had come up with yet another money-saving trick. I call this chapter
Two friends, two rusty ramps, a dolly with flat tires, and a bobcat.
Rick’s idea was this: Place two long ramps at the back-end of the U-haul, and push the dead car up the ramps and into the truck, but he quickly found out that the cargo bay was too high off the ground for his old rusty ramps, as they just weren’t long enough. Step 1 to getting a cargo bay closer to the ground involved backing the front wheels up reinforced ramps, and parking with those wheels a good 16” off the ground.
Not even the trusty front-wheels-on-ramps trick got the cargo bay low enough, so step two was not to lower the cargo bay any further, but was logically to raise the car closer to the destination. The intermediate step was to push Sara’s car up the rusty ramps onto an old dolly with flat tires which Rick pulled around by hitching it to the shovel of his bobcat bulldozer. So it took three strong men, but the car went up the ramps and onto the dolly just fine. Now, car and all, Rick pushed the dolly up to the cargo bay, and the ramps were laid suspended between the gap like two devilish, unreliable bridges.
They needed somebody to straighten the wheels and work the breaks… So before the car was to make the impossibly dangerous trek across the grand canyon of all low-tech car transfers, they asked me to get into the driver’s seat. The ramps were set, the wheels were turned, and my life flashed before my eyes as I imagined the whole car toppling sideways off the ramp. No such luck, the car (and me) survived the transfer just fine, and suddenly I was inside the cargo bay of the truck, just like Rick had imagined.
At this point, Sara and I had known Rick for about 20 hours, and had been with him for about 12. Not once had this gruff looking santa clause mentioned payment for his advice, his time, his gas, his coffee, or anything else. On the trip to return the smaller U-haul to the rental agency, we brought it up with him, and that conversation went a little something like this.
Me: So Rick, I know we haven’t talked about money at all, but we feel we need to pay you for all you’ve done for us.
Rick: Um.. okay. How about $2,500?
Silence. We had been prepared to truly compensate him for the massive amount of time he had spent with us, but we hadn’t expected anything that high. Still… 2,500 felt fair.
Rick: No. That’s what the big guys would charge. I want to be fair. How about I charge you for 3 hours of labor. That’ll be $150.
More silence. Oh Rick Patches tease not these frail hearts just tell us what you want! ...Apparently he was serious. $150 was enough to offset the gas he had burnt, and to put dinner on the table for a few days… That was all he wanted. We paid him $200.
He gave us his number, and asked us to call him when we reached Boise, adding that we should feel free to call him if we felt that we were being taken advantage of by corporate mechanics.
The rest of the trip went by without a problem at all.
“I don’t care what ya believe or not, I believe in the man upstairs and when I’m done here that’s where I’m headed. I sure as hell better get there, because I’ve got lots of people to see.”-
-Rick Patches
We’ll put in a good word for ya Uncle Rick. We all will.
Monday before Thanksgiving, 2009, Sara and I hit the road for a 900 mile road trip from Denver to Boise. Unlike the precisely similar road trips we had already been taking for the last two years, this one was not joyous or exciting. Instead, it was stressful, and bitter: At the end of the week, I would be going home to Denver but Sara would not. Naturally, since she was moving, she was bringing her life with her, which needed more cargo space than a 1994 2-door Honda Celica.
At first the thought was to rent a moving truck big enough to tow her car on a dolly, which was a fairly expensive thing to try to do, so after a bit of trusty internet research, the thought was to bump the cost down to a smaller trailer, fit everything inside that, and tow the trailer with the Celica.
Between the 5’ x 8’ U-haul and the cargo space of the car, everything fit. Barely. Now up to this point, Sara had been in a fit of nerves about the trip, and I had been wearing my strong-face to try to raise her spirits, so already we had red-flag #1 on our list of reasons why this trip wasn’t going to be easy: Intuition. Red Flag #2 was more of a big celestial tap on the shoulder: Ice. Upon leaving for our soon-to-be-infamous road trip, it took about five minutes just to get on the road, as the car/trailer combo had been parked ontop of a giant sheet of slick ice, and every attempt at traction was met the sound of spinning wheels.
What a stressful way to start a trip. So with blood-pressure already spiking, we were on our way, and finally things seemed to be going okay! We put on our newest audio book and drove north out of Colorado without a problem at all. Four or five miles before the Wyoming border, the freeway starts climbing upwards; shallow hill after shallow hill, never downhill but the occasional straightaway gave us time to catch our breath for the next uphill. By this point, we had discovered Red Flag #3: HILLS!
Even an expert driver like Sara can’t make an old manual transmission enjoy towing an entire apartments worth of stuff up thousands of feet worth of hilly, windy Wyoming freeway, and about a mile over the border, things took a nose-dive for road trip hell. First, the car wouldn’t go any faster than 50, then after a brief moment pulled to the side of the road, the car wouldn’t go faster than 10! Almost immediately we smelled burning rubber, and the meters told Sara that her car was overheating.
Just like that, the road-trip came to an end just two hours after we had started. Pulling over to the side of the road, thus began the phone calls to AAA, and the real adventure.
Our tow-truck driver’s name was Steve, a very round, very friendly fellow who recognized that we had absolutely no idea about what to do or where to go. He wanted to save us some money on overage, so instead of taking us to the nearest AAA certified car shop, he made a few calls to his personal mechanics’ personal phones. The first was closing shop for the day, but the second was happy to take a look. Onward in Steve’s truck towing Sara’s car towing Sara’s stuff, we drove for about fifteen minutes, then headed down a little dirt road, and up the dirt driveway to a shop/garage/barnyard/house. This tucked-away establishment belonged to a self-employed mechanic named Rick Patches, who just might be the nicest man in all of Wyoming.
I should probably mention that by this point, we had been told two or three times already that it was the coldest day of the month, and the bone-chilling relentless winds did not disagree.
Standing in the cold with our hands in our pockets looking more out of place than the crooked-necked goat who wandered up to us, Sara and I watched Steve drive off just in time to get the news: The car wasn’t going anywhere. The flywheel had been stripped, and the clutch was burnt out. Hello $800 mechanics bill. Hello stranded, hopeless feeling!
Rick Patches is a gruff looking fellow with fingers as thick as lug-nuts and skin dyed red with 35 years of motor-oil. His voice sounds a bit like rubbing two bags of gravel together, but no matter what he said to Sara and I in those first uncomfortable minutes, it sounded something like “Oh I’ve been there, don’t you worry.” He invited us into his home, about a ten second walk away from his shop, where we had the opportunity to warm up, drink coffee, admire the outlandish log-cabin feel of the home of this sportsman, and brainstorm ideas.
By brainstorm ideas, I mean to imply that Sara and I sat in stupefied silence as Rick suggested what to do next. The obvious choice was to rent a bigger U-haul and a dolly big enough to tow Sara’s car, transfer all of the belongings, and drive on. When it became a likely scenario that a dolly was nowhere nearby, the second option was to leave the car at a shop until the repairs could be finished, then come back to Cheyenne to get it.
Fingering through his phone-book trying to get a hold of his friend at U-haul, Rick came up with an even easier idea. One that would save time and money: put the Celica in the back of a really big U-haul, and drive it all at once without even needing to rent a dolly.
Uneasy, nervous agreement from Sara and I. No mister Patches that doesn’t sound impossible at all… We lift cars four feet off the ground every day! We went to U-haul, got the massive 23’ truck, and ultimately followed Rick (in our massive truck) to a nearby motel, where we briefly discussed our plans for the morning, and parted ways.
We hadn’t eaten since ten that morning, and now it was 7 at night. Putting the minimal necessities into our room, we turned on the heat, and went back to the office to take the motel clerk up on her offer to drive us to the Shari’s across the street. After a very tasty and very satisfying meal we walked back to our room, and discovered that the heater was more of a noise-maker than a heater. Did I mention it was the coldest day of the month?
One miserable night’s sleep and eight hours later, it was time to wake up. Freezing, depressed, more than a little ill with stress, we checked out of our room, and headed back to Uncle Rick’s shop. Backing a 23’ cargo truck two property-lengths down a dirty road does wonders to add to the fantasy that you are a trucker, if only for a day.
Now, the night before, Rick had told us that he was going to bring some friends from Doug’s Tow company (of which Steve-the-jolly was an employee), who had the machines capable of putting a car into a truck. When we arrived on Tuesday morning, we discovered that Rick had come up with yet another money-saving trick. I call this chapter
Two friends, two rusty ramps, a dolly with flat tires, and a bobcat.
Rick’s idea was this: Place two long ramps at the back-end of the U-haul, and push the dead car up the ramps and into the truck, but he quickly found out that the cargo bay was too high off the ground for his old rusty ramps, as they just weren’t long enough. Step 1 to getting a cargo bay closer to the ground involved backing the front wheels up reinforced ramps, and parking with those wheels a good 16” off the ground.
Not even the trusty front-wheels-on-ramps trick got the cargo bay low enough, so step two was not to lower the cargo bay any further, but was logically to raise the car closer to the destination. The intermediate step was to push Sara’s car up the rusty ramps onto an old dolly with flat tires which Rick pulled around by hitching it to the shovel of his bobcat bulldozer. So it took three strong men, but the car went up the ramps and onto the dolly just fine. Now, car and all, Rick pushed the dolly up to the cargo bay, and the ramps were laid suspended between the gap like two devilish, unreliable bridges.
They needed somebody to straighten the wheels and work the breaks… So before the car was to make the impossibly dangerous trek across the grand canyon of all low-tech car transfers, they asked me to get into the driver’s seat. The ramps were set, the wheels were turned, and my life flashed before my eyes as I imagined the whole car toppling sideways off the ramp. No such luck, the car (and me) survived the transfer just fine, and suddenly I was inside the cargo bay of the truck, just like Rick had imagined.
At this point, Sara and I had known Rick for about 20 hours, and had been with him for about 12. Not once had this gruff looking santa clause mentioned payment for his advice, his time, his gas, his coffee, or anything else. On the trip to return the smaller U-haul to the rental agency, we brought it up with him, and that conversation went a little something like this.
Me: So Rick, I know we haven’t talked about money at all, but we feel we need to pay you for all you’ve done for us.
Rick: Um.. okay. How about $2,500?
Silence. We had been prepared to truly compensate him for the massive amount of time he had spent with us, but we hadn’t expected anything that high. Still… 2,500 felt fair.
Rick: No. That’s what the big guys would charge. I want to be fair. How about I charge you for 3 hours of labor. That’ll be $150.
More silence. Oh Rick Patches tease not these frail hearts just tell us what you want! ...Apparently he was serious. $150 was enough to offset the gas he had burnt, and to put dinner on the table for a few days… That was all he wanted. We paid him $200.
He gave us his number, and asked us to call him when we reached Boise, adding that we should feel free to call him if we felt that we were being taken advantage of by corporate mechanics.
The rest of the trip went by without a problem at all.
“I don’t care what ya believe or not, I believe in the man upstairs and when I’m done here that’s where I’m headed. I sure as hell better get there, because I’ve got lots of people to see.”-
-Rick Patches
We’ll put in a good word for ya Uncle Rick. We all will.
You shoulda told me to read this journal! It was amazing!
This is the best thing I've ever read on FA, and the best story I've read this year. Bravisimo! *applauds and bows*