Way Too Much Excitement For One Day

To say that this day was exciting is a sure-fire understatement. When I woke up it was just snowing slightly. The roads would be wet and I would drive in the spray of other vehicles, using windshield wipers all the time. Unfortunately one of the wipers was damaged on the upper end so the cleaning effect was limited to the lower part of the windshield. I had purchased a new blade the previous day, but had been unable to remove the old one. This is MERCEDES, remember? And it just doesn't make things easier that the hood needs to stand open in order to get to the wipers. So today I tried it again. I coaxed and pressed and pushed and pulled, without moving it one millimeter. So I decided to stop some place to buy me a tool. The first few miles down the wet road were tedious as I had to look through the lower part of the windshield where the wiper still had an effect. Suddenly I saw the signs of a home depot looming left of the road. I pulled off and over the overpass. Would they have open this early on a Sunday?

I was in luck there!

I found a combination tool looking almost like a leatherman, just a lot cheaper. Armed with this murderous instrument I started breaking apart the plastic of the blade where it is clamped into the U of the wiper arm. I got my hands bloody and it took unbelievable 20 minutes to get the damn thing off. Plastic shards were all over the place. The mounting of the new blade just took 2 seconds though.

But my troubles had only just begun. Around 11am I stopped for gas. And that's where I lost my Credit Card, before getting back in the car. Only, of course, I didn't know it yet. The epiphany came to me 130 miles farther down the road when stopping again, this time in Wisconsin. I always keep my gas receipts, and I found the phone # of the gas station back in Eau Claire,MN. Oh yes, they had the card on the counter. Some customer had brought it in. But sending it to my address wasn't anything they could do, at least not without the managers approval, who was not on the job on Sundays.
So I called Bea and got the phone # for lost cards. I got it canceled, but the guy on the other end told me that the last use of the card had been declined. So, obviously some smart guy thought he could make a few bucks with it. The abuse of lost CCs has diminished after the cards got a chip implanted which calls for a PIN-code, when used.

The CC was my only one and now I was afraid that I would run into problems getting a room at a motel. But the next Super  8 graciously accepted my debit card. 

I am stopped at a place called OTTAWA, Illinois, and I am recounting my sins of the day. Today I also had my first visit at a restaurant. Have you ever ordered a burger "Well done" and biting into raw meat? That's what happened there. Who was to blame? The server, who admitted to have called it in wrong. 
Back at the motel I got a coffee and another one of the Boston Cream sweet tooth pastries. 

Yummy!