Next time I'm getting a double burger

Things have been pretty busy in Chez Ratfoot these days. During my absence from the blog, I went to California for a few days. Javert and I spent the weekend driving around Carmel and the Big Sur, and then during the week he went to work (in his company's headquarters) while I rented a car and drove up to Willits to visit my friend who is a farmer.

This trip was exciting for a few different reasons. First, I went to In N Out for the first time ever. How is it possible that I have been visiting my family in California for 24 years and had never been to In N Out? I just don't know. I was so excited that I mapped out the location of the airport, the location of our hotel and the closest In N Outs before we left home so we'd be prepared when we arrived. I looked at the menu and the "secret" menu and picked out what I wanted. When our flight was delayed by 30 minutes I started getting anxious--what if we got in too late to go to In N Out? Javert told me not to worry since the restaurant is open till 1:30 am and our flight was scheduled to land at 9:30, but still, one can never worry too much. At least that's my philosophy. And last time we flew that particular airline we were 8 hours late, so I had some reason for concern.

Anyway, we landed on time and all was going well until I realized there might be wild teenagers at In N Out late at night on a Friday! Teenagers are scary! And they have nothing else to do late at night, especially in suburbia, where we were (yet another reason why suburbia is bad.) Turns out I was right. There were packs of wild teenagers loitering around the parking lot and inside the restaurant, they were probably all drunk and they were taking up all the booths, and everyone knows the booths are the best places to sit. We stood in line and ordered and I tried to look cool and teenagery, but the wedding ring and engagement ring make that rather difficult, plus I generally try really hard NOT to look like a teenager. I was wearing all the wrong clothes, I had on jeans and a shirt instead of leggings and a mini skirt and I had decided against the ballet flats and worn my keens instead. We found a place to sit far from the counter and when Javert left me to go pick up the food I was scared a teenager might come over and harass me, but it was all fine and he came back with the food which was so delicious that eating was almost a religious experience. Actually, it was a religious experience because Javert pointed out the tiny creepy bible notations on the food containers and when we got back to the hotel I looked them up in the bible in our nightstand. One was scary and from Revelations and the other had something to do with sharing food. I didn't know In N Out was run by religious zealots and I'm kinda glad I didn't know before I ate there...

It turns out that in the end I was TOTALLY RIGHT about the packs of wild teenagers being a problem though, because one of them broke the mirror on our rental car! We'd gone a total of 8 miles from the airport and it had been maybe 2 hours since we rented it. Javert was naturally upset about this but kept his cool so I wouldn't worry. (Guess what? I worried anyway. Duh.) We spent the rest of the weekend discussing which insurance would cover what and estimating how much it would cost to repair it.

[I wasn't SO worried about the mirror because I had bigger things on my mind, specifically driving the car BY MYSELF on the highway (which means merging!) to Willits and then on a one lane two direction dirt road along the side of a cliff for 12 miles in an area with no cell phone reception and populated only by suspicious and unfriendly marijuana farmers. That will be the topic of my next post.]

In the end the rental car people didn't even notice the giant bite taken out of the mirror, possibly because we returned the car after dark, so we didn't have to pay anything at all. I hope. I can still worry about them tracking me down, but I guess I can just deny everything.