Towing the line in Chicago...:-/

Well, folks, fresh blown back in from Chicago.

Here's the highlight of the trip. As we're driving TO Chicago last week, I get a weather update on my phone. 12 inches of snow expected. 12 inches of snow. 12.

So, we get there, park, hug, dash upstairs to see what Rachael has done with the place......just surreal, to visit your daughter's apartment for the first time. There are familiar comfort things from home and new things from Chicago. "This is her life now", I think to myself. I am visiting HER life. A part of me felt left behind. A part of me feels a surge of incredible pride that almost comes out of the top of my head!

I wake up the next morning very early, feeling like a child on Christmas morning, and tread lightly across the strewn bodies of my children across the floor of the one room we are sharing to go look out the window. It is absolutely quiet and still and white!

When everyone is finally up, dressed, fed and we have our plan for the day we go out to the car to begin our day. Except. There is no car. There are lots of CARS. Just not OUR car. We are standing where we left our car. We look left. We look right. We look at each other. And I start laughing! Rachael, however, is NOT laughing.

I approach a man cleaning the snow off of his car and ask him if it's normal here in Chicago to find one's car gone. Oddly enough, he said "yes". It turns out, they sometimes move your car if it violates any of the 389 random "this is not acceptable here but you have to figure that out yourself" rules in the city. They do, however, kindly place it somewhere close by. Usually. So he advised us to fan out and start looking.

So, Rachael and I go in different directions, me chuckling merrily to myself as I go. I stop and talk to people cleaning off the sidewalks and they all tell me that I've probably been towed. And give me a number to call. So, we call. Boy, were THEY helpful and kind. About like boyscouts gone sour. After a series of calls back home to get our vin number and license plate number so we can prove it's our car, they did verify.....Yep. They had our car.

For the next few hours, we recreated our own version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles schlepping around on various trains, buses and in snowdrifts to get TO the car. Then, another several hundred minutes standing in line in a room filled with little tiny spanish speaking men acting as, for lack of a better word, bodyguards, by the in and out doors of the towing yard, a big angry loud man who said they damaged his car and a smattering of other people all having fun getting their cars out of hock too! It's fun to make friends!

I was happy to contribute $160.00 to the revenue of the City of Chicago. And they, then, were happy to give us our car back. With all that hilarity, we decided to go back to the apartment. And park the car.