The Ribar Travel Experience (Take 1)

We are having a phenomenal time out here in Portland. I love visiting my sister, and we have definitely made the most of this vacation! I will write more about this trip after we get home, but we wanted you to share in some of the joys adventures of traveling the Ribar way… This is where lots of stuff goes wrong, almost to the point of hysterical laughter because there is nothing else you can do.

 

Let me take you back to March 2003. The place? Seattle. This was the first big trip Dave and I took together as a couple. We flew out to see my sister E in Portland, and decided to take her car up to Seattle to visit an old friend of mine from college while she was working (with her permission, of course). The drive was beautiful (from what we could see through the fog), and we made it there in good time. I couldn’t get a hold of my friend once we got there, so we decided to check into a hotel so that we could get a little nap in, as we had left really early that morning. We walked around Seattle for much of the day, shopping and sightseeing. It was pretty fun.

 

That night we finally met up with my friend, driving over to his apartment in the college housing area of Seattle. He directed us to park in the unmarked guest parking spot when we got there. He was the assistant manager of the apartments, and informed us that they had just changed the location of the guest parking. So we headed up to his apartment and had a good time eating yummy organic food (gotta love the west coast hippies), and then headed out for beers with him and his girlfriend. We chatted for a long time, and had a good time trying different beers that you can’t get in Minnesota.

 

As we walked back to the car after that, we said our goodbyes to my friend. We got closer to the parking area and I suddenly realize that our car (my sister’s car, actually) was missing!!! I flipped out. I thought at first that it had been stolen, and we quickly headed up to my friend’s apartment. He called his manager who confirmed that he had had a red 2-door car towed earlier in the night – my sister’s car. I was beside myself. Here we are in a city 2,000+ miles away from home, having to figure out how to get a car that wasn’t mine out of the towing compound.

 

My friend offered to have a friend of his who grew up in Seattle drive us to our hotel. On the way there, his friend got lost, and we spent 1.5 hours driving around downtown Seattle trying to figure out how to get on the one-way street that would take us to our hotel. We finally got there around 2 am, and I was on the verge of tears. That or hysterical laughter.

 

The next morning I had to call my sister to tell her what happened. She was none too pleased with us, and had to send a photocopy of her driver’s license to the towing company to verify that we weren’t trying to steal her car. We then called a taxi to take us to my friend’s apartment. He told us that it was a quick walk to the towing lot. Guess what? We got lost on the way there, and it ended up being a 1.5 hour walk. In brand new shoes. Ouchie. We finally got there, and the total was something like $350. We were newlyweds, so of course we had to put it on the credit card (the nearly maxed out credit card). My friend felt bad, and offered to pay for part of it since it was pretty much completely his fault, but then discovered that he could only give us $50. We grumpily drove back to Portland vowing to never step foot in Seattle again.

 

Watch for Take 2 coming to a Ribar blog near you…