Hittin' the Highway

Oh goodness, faithful readers, do I ever have a great "Only Mark" story for you! Definitely one of those situations that probably only I could get into. I'm not sharing details yet, but it should be a good one.

Since I'm only teasing you with that story, I'll give you another fun "Only Mark" story that happened recently.

So a couple weeks ago, my bosses (they're a married couple) and I decided we needed to head to Atlanta for a seminar with our parent company over there. The seminar was from about 7-9 in the evening and Atlanta is about a 3 or 4 hour drive, I knew it'd be a long night. We left the office at about 4:30 or so and hit the road. My boss decided we'd take his car, so off we go. We get about 2 hours up the road or so and decide to go through a drive through for something to eat. After we get our food, my boss announces that he can't eat and drive, so I volunteer to take over at the wheel. This is when it gets interesting...

As I start backing out of the parking space, I notice the bright lights are on in the car. It was just starting to get dark, so I just wanted to turn them down to the regular lights. Seeing me look around for the way to do that, my boss chimes in with "Oh, don't bother trying to turn the lights down, that's all we've got!" Apparently they were having some sort of electrical issues which caused the low beams to not work, just the high beams. We were already running a little bit behind, but, of course, not longer after we get back on the road, we hit a major traffic back up on the interstate. We never did figure out what was going on, but basically, we lost nearly half an hour sitting in stop and go traffic. When we finally get back to the open road, I really have to move that SUV to avoid missing the entire seminar. Fortunately I have torrid history of driving at very high speeds, so I was quite comfortable with this. So here I am, flying down the highway in a big ol' truck at 80+ mph with nothing but my high beams on. Yeah...I think much of the state of Georgia was pissed at me for tailgating them with my bright lights on that night...oh well.

We go to the seminar...it was a good one, worth the drive, and then it was time to head home. My boss was actually quite tired, and I don't think he likes driving at night that much (especially with only the brights), so I hopped into the driver's seat again. With the bright lights a-blazin', we roll back up I-85. Running low on gas and getting hungry, we pull over near Commerce, Georgia. It's nearly midnight at this time, which was actually nice because there was a lot less traffic to offend with my headlights. As I'm pulling out of the gas station, I see rain drops begin to fall on the windshield. When my bosses see me start fiddling around to turn on the windshield wipers, they just start laughing. Apparently, as part of the aforementioned electrical problems, the windshield wipers also were not functional. Yeah, and my hopes that the rain was just a passing sprinkle were dashed as well.

I hit the interstate and proceed to start driving through very heavy rain that was probably one of the hardest rains we've had in months (well, maybe since the last time I drove back from Atlanta when the air was broken in my car so all the windows fogged up and I could hardly see). It was certainly an interesting time, my one boss was sleeping in the back seat and his wife was sitting patiently next to me listening to me ramble on about one thing or another for pretty much the whole drive home. I'm not sure why I was so chatty at that hour, perhaps I was still excited from the seminar, perhaps I was just a bit tired and was trying to keep myself awake, or perhaps I was just trying to distract her (or me) from the fact that on more than one occasion I was having quite a bit of difficulty seeing the road. At any rate, we finally returned home at about 2:30 in the morning or so.

But, yeah, I was driving down the interstate, in someone else's car, at 1:00 in the morning with only bright lights and no windshield wipers in the pouring down rain...and do it all as calmly as ever, as though there was nothing wrong at all. Who else but Mark? haha

I guess all that time spent driving through torrential downpours in Florida finally paid off. Good times!