Inconveniences

If you can possibly avoid the mistake of misplacing the keys to your rental car, you should. Misplacing the keys to your rental car presents the opportunity to practice patience, kindness, tolerance, peacefulness, and a number of other virtues in trying circumstances. Mostly, you wait on the phone, and the rental car company tries to tell you that you're on your own...good luck in as many words and hours as possible, The car company's trying doesn't end until you give up and call a taxi for a ride back to your hotel.

Thankfully, I was able to see the upside in the situation. The unlicensed cab and limousine company I called sent over a sedan which turned out to be a white 90's Buick that drove me across the causeway for the price of a very nice dinner for one. Sharing the backseat with a walker and two canes that I presume belonged to the driver or his partner was an added bonus.  It's an experience that I won't soon forget.

I did manage to get in some walking today on the Eastern Shore Trail. I took off on foot from the hotel in search of dinner. Since I'd spent my dinner money on a ride, I opted for the slightly less expensive, but equally gastronomically pleasing, "bag o' burritos" from the Taco Bell.  Not bad...not good...not expensive...filling.  Pretty good deal for a person on foot.

I captured the first "sharable" picture of an alligator on the way to my bean stuffed flour tortilla delights. The 'gator, an average sized bugger, was lounging around in D'Olive Creek annoying the fish in his immediate vicinity if they're aerial acrobatics are any real indication.

Alligator - Daphne, AL

I also noticed that the Easter Shore Trail kiosk on US 90 has taken it's second beating in less than a year. Rory Conlan asked me if I thought folks were hitting the trail map shelter on purpose just for the sake of mischief.  I sent him the following picture and explanation.

Eastern Shore Trail Kiosk - Down for the count a second time in a year

Those broken and leaning poles are six inch square pressure treated lumber. There is a broken hubcap, part of a broken windshield, and various other odds and ends that you might find at the scene where violence has been visited on a automobile by something solid and relatively unyielding. If folks are doing this for the sake of mischief, the must be a special kind of joker who likes to perpetrate very expensive (for them or whomever owns the car) acts of very loud vandalism. I'm pretty sure this is happening because folks aren't paying enough attention when rounding the curve that leads up to this point several meters departed from the right lane of the road.

Today I learned a thing or two about the willingness of a certain rental car company's willingness to help you get out of a jam associated with misplaced keys. They're charging you daily rent, and it turns out they're perfectly willing to collect the fee whether you're using their car or it's sitting uselessly in the parking lot at work. Fortunately the keys were located in the back seat of a friend from work who drove us all to lunch. I had managed at that point to extricate myself from the most pressing problem with the application of forty five dollars and without making an angry ass of myself with the folks who were going a pretty far stretch out of their way not to help me. When he called to announce the good news, I was pretty stoked.

You never can tell what lessons life my put in front of you to learn. I'll wake up in the morning an eager pupil with a taste for adventure.