Fancy Stationary

So let me tell you about my novel experience while away on a work trip to DC and why, exactly, the title of this post is actually not misspelled.

Around 3:45 am on the second night of my stay, the hotel’s front desk called and asked me to come downstairs. “It’s about your car,” the staffer said.

Hoo-boy. I dressed and went downstairs to the parking lot, met up with the security guard, having only had time to imagine either that someone had run into it or that a window had been broken out.

I hadn’t considered that someone would have run off with all four wheels and left it precariously perched on a couple of plastic convenience store drink crates.

A newer model Toyota Camry rental car elsewhere in the lot also had all four wheels stolen. That couple, from Washington State, was on their way to see her father in Virginia Beach, after he’d suffered a stroke. Fortunately, the hotel is very close to their rental company nearby and they secured an alternative and were still able to leave on time.

The next day, a tow truck driver put temporary wheels on that couple’s rental Camry and drove it to the rollback flatbed to haul it off.

As for mine: it had to sit on those plastic crates for two days. I notice that incoming hotel guests chose not to park near it, as though it had leprosy or body odor. It was a sad sight.

Sixteen months after I bought it, I’m still toting around this silly little crush on my hybrid Camry XSE, with 20,000 miles together, often casting covetous admiring glances at its lovely shape and continuously delighting in its highly-partisan Carolina blue color. This was not the *tireless* devotion to it I had in mind, though.

But I’m also mindful of that tally of costs borne by others because of what the thieves targeted and tackled. I lost two days of work. I had to book an additional night’s stay and delay my return home until Friday. I worry that the security guard was fired. The hotel manager insisted on removing the daily parking fees from my bill, so it cost the hotel. I’ll have to wait and see if further repairs are required after the wheels are replaced: is there a bending of the frame? Was the underside damaged? And will my auto insurance rate be raised after filing this claim?

I’d not packed for the weather or for three days stuck in a Silver Spring hotel room. I think it was 80 degrees and sunny in Winston-Salem on Wednesday, but it was a miserable drear of wet and mess, and only in the mid-50s, along the DC-Maryland border where I was cooped up.

With only two pairs of jeans and just one halfway-finished book, I had to find ways to amuse myself while remaining close to the phone for updates or directions. But hey: I had plenty of time to sort out a lot of pre-planning and mindwork on an important new presentation that I’m scheduled to deliver to Winston-Salem/Forsyth County administrators during the final week of May.

Meanwhile, I’d like to think I did reasonably well on this test of my zen.

At last, about 1:30 pm Friday, as I rolled my suitcase out to the car with enormous hopefulness, there was Kevin Strength, the service vendor assigned to get me back up and running. You might, with very little effort, be able to imagine the relief that brought to me. He already had the wheels out and was beginning to install them.

He made super short work of it while I officially checked out after overstaying my reservation; he showed me the specs for the new anti-theft security lug nut on each wheel; we shook hands and I embarked on the long drive home. (I took the GPS advice and ate the high cost of the express lanes on I-95 from DC to Fredericksburg, before enduring the crawl and start and stop from there to Richmond; once I exited onto I-195 and then took a different toll route to US 360 to cut across Southside Virginia, it was a surprisingly easy drive the rest of the way!)

I suppose for a while I'm going to repeatedly catch myself thinking about wheels...and not take them for granted any time soon.