This year I was supposed to go to France with my mom in May, then Denver with my SMARTS girls in June, then Indianapolis for the DCI Championships with my mom and sister and niece, then the Swiss Alps with Ben in September. Instead, I stayed in my house.
We went out to dinner on Thursday, March 12, and I went to work on the 13th. After that, for many months we barely left home at all. Seven months into this pandemic, we're now seeing friends outside once in a while, I've been to the office maybe six times for an hour or two, I go to Target once a month to pick up a prescription they won't deliver. Generally, though, we are at home, and day to day don't find it difficult. We have jobs that are well-suited to working from home and have come up with plenty of ways to entertain ourselves. I've been teaching myself to play the guitar, learning Christmas carols on the piano, getting super into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, trying not to check political twitter and FiveThirtyEight every twenty minutes, et cetera. Ben is learning calculus and studying electronic circuits, weeding our half-acre yard by hand, and constantly trying to come up with new things he can take apart and put back together inside his car.
But even happy introverts start to go crazy after four months of staring at the same set of walls - especially once it got too hot to spend any significant time outdoors. In July we decided to risk contamination and rented a cabin in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. Little Switzerland is midway between Boone and Asheville off the Blue Ridge Trail, a little over three hours from home. We made it the whole way without stopping and met the cabin owner at the post office so we could follow him to the cabin.
LOOK HERE WE ARE IN A NEW PLACE.
This is the small "downtown" area of Little Switzerland. Naturally we did not get to see what's inside of any of those buildings but I'm sure it's nice.
The cabin was small, just one bedroom, but perfect for us. We brought all our own food so we wouldn't have to go anywhere.
This was the star of the show, though: the view from the deck. Fifteen minutes after arriving, sitting on that deck in 65 degree weather, I realized the whole thing had already been worth it even if we never did anything else the rest of the week.
Our only activities were daily hikes. This was Crabtree Falls, only 20 minutes or so from the cabin.
We also drove to the top of Mount Mitchell, the highest point on the East Coast, and did a trail along the ridge that claimed to not have much overall elevation gain, but after starting we realized this is because it constantly goes up and down and back up.
I hung in there for a couple hours but you know, once it gets to the point of hauling yourself around on ropes I'm pretty much done. I turned back and Ben went on to the next peak and then turned around. He ended up hiking about 3 miles further than I did but made it back to the car only 1/2 hour after me, which feels confusing.
After this day on Mount Mitchell, my legs hurt so much we had to take a day off and hang around the cabin. The trip was perfect, exactly what we needed. Perfect weather, quiet, beautiful, lots of good exercise.
And then a half hour into the drive home, my transmission exploded. We barely made it to the top of an exit ramp, engine smoking. We were 200 miles from home and had cancelled AAA years ago. My car came with roadside assistance, but when I called they said my membership had expired. Nobody told me it was going to expire! They could still help me out, but not for free. They wanted to tow the car to the nearest Audi dealership in Asheville, but that was in exactly the wrong direction. Who knows how long we'd get stuck there depending on what was wrong with the car? Staying in a hotel and trying to figure out how to get food during a pandemic did not sound like what we wanted to be doing.
I started calling around trying to find someone to tow it to Raleigh. Nada. The local towing companies were really apologetic about not being able to help, particularly because that exit is a renowned car theft hotspot and under no circumstances should we leave the car unattended there for even thirty minutes. Around the time someone was telling me this on the phone, Ben found a used syringe lying on the ground.
I called AudiCare back and told them to arrange a tow to Raleigh for the sweet price of $800. All this took a couple of hours and it was ninety degrees. It felt like a relief at that point to have something arranged even though it was an obscene amount of money to just get the car to someone who could tell us what was wrong with it. Then I got a text from the tow company, confirming the arrangements, and helpfully pointing out that because of COVID we would not be able to ride with the driver and would need to make private transportation arrangements. Oh, sure. That sounds easy.
I found a local-ish cab company. They could have someone take us to Raleigh for $400. She suggested calling an Enterprise Rental Car location not too far away, but they didn't have any cars. "We might have one this afternoon." Not helpful, guy! I called the cab company back and told them to send someone. Then I thought, "I wonder what Todd & Elise are doing today?" It turns out they were doing nothing, and our amazing friends got in the car to drive 200 miles and pick us up.
The tow truck guy arrived and took the car, leaving us on the side of the road waiting for a cab that was going to take us to a nearby truck stop. During this period of the day, many people stopped to make sure we were all right. One woman tried to give us cash ("it's not much, but maybe it can help") and a pamphlet about Jesus.
Finally we made it to the truck stop. After four months of never going anywhere but our own home, we had to sit inside a truck stop Subway for two and a half hours. It was surreal. I'd say about 40% of the patrons were masked up, which frankly felt better than I'd expect from rural North Carolina. Fortunately it was a big space, and we had a corner all to ourselves away from everyone else.
I don't know if I've ever been happier to see anyone than when Elise walked through the door. Then of course we all rode in their car without masks for three hours, but frankly it felt like if we were going to get COVID from this experience we'd already have gotten it.
Before we were even home, the dealership called and told me some kind of road debris had cracked the foundation housing and caused it to explode. The transmission itself was by some miracle not damaged, and I had the car back within a couple of days and everything was fine.
VACATION!
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