Car crash
I guess suspenseful endings don’t work all that well when I am writing a bunch of posts quickly in succession, but I am trying to break this up for easier readability.
Anyway, on the way to Target that evening, we pulled over to the side of the road (there was street parking) so I could make a phone call to my dad. After sitting there about a minute in park talking on the phone, I saw some headlights that seemed to be pulling up behind us. Next thing I know we are being slammed from behind. I tell my dad what just happened and I check to make sure Mariam is alright, which thankfully she is. We get out of the car to see what happened and the entire left side of my trunk is crunched and then scrapes go all the way up the driver’s side. The dude who hit us gets out of the car stinking of alcohol and obviously drunk, so I call the police and they send someone over. In the meantime a nice elderly man from a nearby house lets Mariam sit inside since it’s raining pretty hard and the drunk guy starts acting very strangely by hiding stuff in his trunk and digging around in some bushes nearby. A policewoman shows up and starts taking information, and right away she smells alcohol on his breath and asks him how much he has been drinking. So, thankfully she is really nice and sympathetic to us. The tow truck comes and starts taking away our car while we waited for some friends to pick us up. While we were walking away, the guy was surrounded by three cops interrogating him. I dunno what his final story was.
Both Mariam and I were quite shaken but aside from a sore necks, we were fine. The aches kept me up part of the night and definitely made packing the next day not all that fun.
The insurance company was helpful in getting us a rental car, but in the end we got a pretty paltry sum in return. I suppose if I was the litigious type I could have gotten a lot more from a drunk driver, but I just wanted to be finished with it all. Thankfully we were not planning on bringing the car to California with us anyway, so it wasn’t too big of a deal. The car was of course totaled.. I guess I could feel bad about such a lame ending to my first vehicle, but I really didn’t have the time to think about it too much.
Just another one of those stories we will be able to share with our kids.