Lifestyle

From Bathroom Breaks to Prison Breaks…


We took off for my business trip on Saturday morning. We did not get in a huge hurry to leave. By the time we dropped off a tractor at the neighbors, stopped and said goodbye to my mother in law, and dropped something off at my daughter’s, it was probably at least 10am. We had kind of hoped to leave more like 8 am. We plan, God laughs.

We decided that we weren’t going to stress over it and take things as they came. I think everything was going pretty good. I forgot my toothbrush but remembered before I needed it, so I grabbed one at a gas station.

No biggy.

For supper, we decided to stop at a Pizza Hut. Gimme a deep pan, pork sausage any day! Well, the one we stopped at wasn’t the kind you eat at. You take it with you. So…I go in and order. They say 20 minutes. There was no public restroom in Pizza Hut, so we decided to go somewhere and come back.

Hubby wanted to go to the gas station. I thought the Rite Aid across the street looked like a better option. Hubby didn’t want to walk all the way to the back of the store to find the restroom. I said the gas station looked sketchy. He was driving, so he won. And this is what I was greeted with inside…a homemade “restroom” sign and whatever that was for the handle on the toilet.

It kind of looked like a coat hanger, but it was stronger and thicker than that. Almost like a hairpin leg. But I did not get up close and personal and look it over.

S K E T C H Y! Don’t you agree?

We got our pizza and got back on the road. We stopped somewhere in West Virginia for the night around 10pm. The motel was nothing to brag about either. Stains and cigarette burns on the comforter. But it was cheap, and we were done for the night.

Nothing too exciting on the road until our trip back home. Again, we had planned loosely to leave around 8am. But we got started chatting with some of the peeps that were still there and saying our goodbyes and next thing ya know, it’s noon before we got on the road. Grabbed lunch and here we go again, heading for home.

Things went fine until almost 6pm. We didn’t have an exact plan of when we wanted to stop for the night. I was beat so I could have stopped anytime and just slept for 24 hours straight. Around 6pm, we came to a halt on the interstate. We could see flashing lights up ahead but had no idea what was going on.

Cops and highway department trucks were coming and going to whatever had happed up ahead, but we were stopped.

I cannot imagine how far back the cars had to be lined up. At one point, hubby got out and talked to a semi driver and asked if ok if he relieved himself on the other side of his rig. He said I could too, but I decided to hold it a while longer.

We sat there for two hours.

Some of the cars ahead of us were starting to get turned around and head back the interstate, going the wrong way. Then a highway department guy stopped and told us we could turn around and go back the way we came and take a detour to go around an end up on the interstate again. He didn’t give us a lot of details, but he said that two prisoners were being transported. They were in shackles and handcuffs. Somehow one of the prisoners busted out a back window and hurled himself out of it while they were going down the interstate at 80mph. He escaped out of the vehicle only to be hit by another vehicle.

I can’t find any reports on this. It seems kind of hush-hush. But it sure makes you think. I’m pretty sure he was convicted of murder and was being transported to where he would spend the rest of his life. Was he trying to commit suicide?

He surely didn’t think he would survive hurling himself out onto the interstate? What did the other prisoner witness exactly? What if we had been a minute sooner? Would we have run over the prisoner on the interstate? So many unanswered questions. The news reports are very vague. One of those things we will never know the answers to.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. Thankfully.

We drove a few more hours and checked in around 11pm and got a good night’s sleep.

I did see some working phone booths that morning! I have only seen maybe a shell of one, or if it had a phone, none of it worked. I picked it up and listened for the dial tone. Sure enough, it worked! I didn’t know there were any still in existence!

We made it back home by 7pm Sunday night. Exhausted and happy to be home and surrounded by our three fur babies. I think they missed us.

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