Monday Adventures

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
~ G.K. Chesterton

"We are plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't see what anybody sees in them..."
~ Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit

Taras and I had an…um…adventure last Monday. It didn’t hit me that we were having an adventure until we were sitting in traffic on I-65 N after a pointless excursion halfway across town…but that’s the middle of the story. Indulge me if you will, and let me tell it from the beginning.

I suppose it all started about 6 weeks ago when our dryer finally died. Our washer and dryer are both getting on in years—they weren’t exactly young when someone at church donated them to me and my brother Josh when we shared an apartment in 2004—but they have certainly served us well. We’d been holding out hope that they would live on for another couple of years at least, despite some funny noises.

Then came the day when we were forced to put the tired old dryer to rest and start using the laundry room in our apartment building. It’s very conveniently located just a few steps from our front door; we don’t even have to go downstairs. However, we do have to pay $1.25 for every load we dry.

We looked at our budget, then at Craigslist, then at our budget again…then we stopped looking at the budget and decided we needed to take the plunge and buy our first large appliances as a married couple. We found a great deal on a washer/dryer set on Craigslist, and told the seller we’d pick it up Monday evening. David* emailed back Monday morning (from his Blackberry), to let us know we should come around 7:00, since he and his wife wouldn’t be home until around 6:45. No problem, we thought, that gives us plenty of time to drive from Antioch to Bellevue, and should keep us from hitting any bad traffic on the way home.

My parents selflessly allowed us to borrow their vehicle and two of my siblings for the evening. Daddy took our Rodeo home and we headed out West with Caleb and Alyssa in the backseat of the Suburban. We only lacked one important element: the address in Bellevue where we would pick up the washer and dryer. We hadn’t heard back from David after we responded to his email that morning, but he had said he’d be in meetings all day, so we shrugged it off and started the long drive Bellevue-ward. We’ll try calling him again when we get there, we said.

7:00 arrived. We called. Nothing. We called Daddy and asked him to check our e-mail just in case. Nope. Daddy e-mailed David for us again. Maybe he’s just running late; he’ll probably check his Blackberry soon. Meanwhile, the four adventurers pulled in a parking lot and decided to walk around in TJ Maxx, just for fun.

Caleb, Alyssa, and I tried on fun hats and sunglasses and read children’s books while Taras kept trying to get in touch with David. After 45 minutes, we finally gave up and headed back to Cool Springs to trade cars with Daddy and go home.

When we got on I-65 South, Caleb said something like “Kelly, I hope you know a back way home; that traffic (going North) doesn’t look good.”

“Yeah,” I said, not even looking to see what he meant. I was singing along to Alyssa’s CD, and didn’t give his comment another thought…that is, until I was sitting in that traffic an hour later wishing I’d been listening to my little brother instead of Chuck Wicks.

Our exit wasn’t even open, so we took a detour and finally made it home…empty-handed and with a somewhat lighter gas tank. Taras got ready for bed and I went to the fridge, only to discover a nice, fat lump of bread dough I had planned to bake that evening. About an hour later, I finally slumped into bed, leaving a new loaf of bread cooling on the counter and the old washer and dryer slumbering in the laundry room. 38 minutes to Tuesday, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

* Name has been changed to protect the guilty.