This has turned into not quite the weekend I had in mind. Both Susan and I were looking forward to seeing Adam again, and that has been dominating our thoughts over the past few days. He had just finished his finals at Southern Illinois University, and he was in the process of driving home from Carbondale. The plan was for him to be home sometime early yesterday evening. Of course, when you drive a '91 Toyota Corolla with 197,000 miles on it, plans are made to be disrupted.
At about 5pm yesterday, I got a call on my cell phone from Adam. He was stranded in a small town in southwestern Louisiana off I-10. The water pump had gone out, and no one in beautiful downtown Breaux Bridge was willing to fix it on a Saturday night. Breaux Bridge is about 220 miles from Seabrook, so we had two choices: put him up in a hotel room (and, from what I could see, there are none in Breaux Bridge), or drive to Louisiana to pick him up. Of course, if you know Susan the way that I do, there was really only one choice, so by 5.30 we were on our way to Cajun Country. ROAD TRIP!!!
The Lousiana border is just a bit less than two hours from Seabrook, but in the seven years since I moved here from Portland, I've never been there. Now that I have been to Louisiana, I realized how little I've been missing all these years. There are more bugs (most of whom now inhabit the windshield of my truck) than people, and some parts of southwestern Louisiana are little more than rice paddies as far as the eye can see.
And then there's Breaux Bridge, a "suburb" of Lafayette. Outside of being the hometown of Carolina Panthers QB Jake Delhomme, Breaux Bridge is a deservedly obscure small town that makes it's living off unsuspecting people who happen to take the wrong exit off I-10. It's one of those "why did we stop here, and can we PLEASE get back on the road ASAP" towns. Of course, in defense of Breaux Bridge, the folks at the local McDonald's were nice enough to allow Adam to hang out there for a few hours, but I don't think Adam shed any tear over leaving.
We finally got home a little after 1am, and being the night owl I'm not, I feel like crap this morning. It's a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning, and all I really want to do is to lapse into a vegetative state. Even so, it is good to have Adam home, and I'm glad that he was in a place that we were able to help him out. Looking on the bright side, I finally got to go to Louisiana, and I imagine I'm a better person for it. Or not.
Of course, now I now know exactly how far one tank of gas in my F-150 will take me. It will get me as far as Breaux Bridge, LA and no farther. I suppose this is as good a reason as any to be thankful that my truck has an auxiliary tank, eh?
