It was near midnight, the end of Spring Break. We had made it out of Puerto Rico, and as far as Chicago, but no further. There were no other flights going out to Cedar Rapids that night, and the flights next morning were all over-sold. We hemmed and hawed what to do; do we check onto a bus? Try and fly red-eye standbys through other airports into Iowa? But none of those left till the morrow either. Sleep at the airport again? Check into a spendy hotel?
Things were looking grim. Finally we couldn't put it off anymore, it was getting way too late, and it was time we bite the bullet and face the music: we had to rent a car, pay the exorbitant one-way fee, and drive it till 4am. There was no way around it.
So we hopped on the Midway Airport Shuttle to the car rental...at the exact same moment as this older gentleman all decked out in Hawkeye gear, along with his teenage son. Ladies and gentlemen, I have never been so excited to see Iowa colors in my whole life.
We chatted! Our fellow Hawkeye fan was a retired lawyer living in the Des Moines area. Turns out he was returning from Spring Break as well, chaperoning his son and some other teenagers down in Cabo. They, too, arrived in Midway, only to find that only the father had a ticket to Des Moines, while the son (whose name was even Kevin McCallister!) had to be left behind in Chicago!
Naturally, this didn't sit well with him, so he decided to rent a car back to Iowa, too! I asked if he'd like to split one, and he readily said of course! Suddenly this drive looked a lot more feasible.
My gf and I had a brief panic attack when he started asking the rental-place about mid-size sedans, and so we asked if we could maybe drive a different size...so he started asking about full-size sedans! Once we explained we were students and were thinking of something maybe smaller, he just laughed and waved his hand, saying he would take care of it. When I calculated that between us, we owed him close to $200 for our half of the rental, he insisted he would accept no more than $150. "Besides, you're only going to Cedar Rapids, we're driving clear to Des Moines!" he said with a wink.
I drove the first leg, sailing out of Chicago (turns out there's not a lot of traffic at 1 in the morning); I had been nodding off in the airport, but now that we were on the road our conversation roared to life. While his son and my gf fell asleep in the back, I told him about my graduate studies and Puerto Rican mission service; learning of my Mormonism, he launched into an extended diatribe against his first wife's family of Jehova's Witnesses. We cracked jokes, traded stories, and sped through Illinois under a full moon.
As we crossed the Mississippi, he insisted on buying us all breakfast, so we stopped at the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Truckstop." My gf was hilariously delirious as she woke up in confusion and asked where on earth we were. "Why, we're at the World's Largest Truckstop!" I crooned, "Can't you tell?" It was at least 10 minutes before she realized she wasn't dreaming the whole thing.
So there we sat, at 3am, eating bacon and eggs in an empty diner, chatting with the waitress, when I slid him the $150 we owed him...only for him to slide me back 100 of it. "For your wedding!" he said with a smile. When I warned him that, as a poor grad student, I would take full advantage of his generosity, he just hand-waived again and said if he had known he'd have this much fun driving out of Chicago tonight, he wouldn't have even worried when Southwest over-sold their flight!
He drove the next leg, dropped us off at Cedar Rapid airport, we exchanged addresses, and then I picked up my van (the Gypsy-Cab) and returned to Iowa City. I need to remember to send him a wedding announcement!
And that's the story of how my gf and I spent a grand total of $50 together to make it from Chicago Midway to Iowa City! If we had settled on getting a rental just a few minutes earlier or later, we would have been out hundreds of dollars, and what's more, missed out on ton of fun. These are the moments in life that you can't plan on, that you can't budget for--sometimes the universe syncs up at just the right moment in ways you can never predict, when you least expect it. It's a great reminder that in our world that is at once so programmed and so chaotic, that so many wonderful things far beyond our control can still work together for our good.
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