the twilight zone

It has been an extremely busy past week. I had to take blood samples from an incredibly number of mice and administer vaccines to all of them last week before I left for Michigan for Thanksgiving. A lot of work and time, but also nerve-wracking, because I always have the fear that the immunization won't got quite right and two months worth of toil will be a complete loss from day 0. Once the mice were all set, I scrambled back to the apartment to rapidly throw various items into a laundry basket, grab Joelle's medicine, stuff her (very unwillingly) into her carrier, dismantle her cage, and put it all into my car so I could finally get on the road for the long drive home across the Ohio Turnpike.

The plan was to meet my brother, Jonathan, in Ann Arbor, where one of his friends from college resides. It breaks up the trip for both of us, is completely not out of the way, and gives me someone to keep me awake for the final 2.5 hours of the trip across the very flat and sometimes boring Michigan expressways. I made the decision to take a little bit of a different way to the meeting point - I generally drive the Turnpike to Maumee and connect to US 23 to drive towards Ann Arbor, but this time I decided to follow MapQuest's suggestion and get off an exit earlier, hit 75 for a short period, drive across Toledo on 475, and connect to 23 north of Maumee. Good in theory, and actually it was going great until I approached exit 16.

I have no idea what is at exit 16 or how far away it is from 23, but as I approached, traffic came to a near stand-still. I thought I had hit some rush-hour traffic, although it was pretty late for that. Instead, it turned out to be a police car blocking the road and directing all cars to the right with red burning flares. I obliviously followed the flares and the traffic and suddenly found that I (and everyone else) was on the exit ramp of exit 16! I figured that there would be a DETOUR sign telling me what to do next, or that I could at least jump back on the highway, but there was no sign, and there was another police car and flares blocking the on-ramp.

So I started following some cars, but they all turned off the main road, and I was pretty sure that wasn't the way to go. So I stopped and asked at a hotel for some directions, but the person at the desk had no idea how to get anywhere. So then I thought I'd trust my intuition and head the way I thought I should go. Fortunately, I didn't trust my intuition very long (it was wrong, anyhow), and I stopped at a restaurant to ask for their suggestions. Everyone there told me how to get back onto 475, and it took me a while to get them to realize that I COULDN'T and that was the whole problem. So, finally a person who actually knew how to drive around the area was located from the throes of the kitchen, and I had my directions. I turned around and went back from where I had come. I noticed that cars were driving in both east and west directions across the overpass that was 475. I wondered...and indeed, I now COULD get onto the on-ramp! So I did. And I got to Ann Arbor in no time.

I had to ask myself many times whether I had just imagined all of that. It took me no more than 10 minutes to get the directions once I was dumped off the highway! I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation (a crash or accident being cleaned up, for example, and I just caught the tail end of it before the roadway was reopened), but I felt like I had entered and exited the Twilight Zone.

Maybe it was just not a very lucky day for me, because as I approached Ann Arbor I checked my voice mail on my cell phone and was able to listed to two of the three messages before the battery went caput. Having no car charging capability, I was stuck and guessed that the third message was Jon telling me where precisely to meet him in Ann Arbor. I arrived at our desination and saw his car and went to the restaurant we had discussed as a meeting place, but he wasn't there (and there was no outlet in the bathroom for me to plug in my phone!). I figured my best bet was to just go to the house I thought looked like the one where Jon's friend, with whom we were leaving his car, lived.

I picked wrong.

Twice.

And nobody knew Jon's friend, even though he lived right next door to them (well, okay, so his parents lived there, but...still).

Fortunately, just as I was starting to despair and contemplating going back to the first wrong house to ask if I could plug in my phone to check the messages, Jon showed up, and we squashed his luggage into my car and were off after showing the man at the nearby convenience store what my car looked like under the hood because he thought he was getting ripped off by the repair shop his friend's same-model-as-mine car was being serviced by. We confirmed that the part the shop said he needed did not appear necessary for the proper fixing of the car.

...Ah, life. It is so deliciously confusing and amusing and random.