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The Last 10-Day: Chapter One
I’ve been putting off the blog for a while now to take care of work in the studio and a bit of travelling. It’s time to fill in the gaps and recall ten of the most chaotic days of my life. Here’s day 1.
Shit got weird at the onset… We departed for Riva with a little over a quarter tank, and it was a good idea to fill up for the long drive through France to Barcelona. The first service station we saw, we pulled off, got some gas, and B-lined it for La Tourette – more like red-lined it. Just past the Italian border near Como, the Volkswagen I was driving started to lose power steering and wouldn’t shift into gear. After a few minutes of that mess we were creeping to a stop on the shoulder, helplessly watching our professor’s car leave us behind without the means to call him. Initially I thought the battery was dead, and we were just the victims of an untimely but common issue. Ten minutes of relatively calm “what the hell are we going to do?” time passed, and Jack suddenly mentioned that the radio wouldn’t still be on if the battery was dead… and the plot THICKENS… you could see the gears turning in his head for a moment before he finally dropped the bomb… “the only reason this could be happening is if you filled up the diesel tank with regular gas”.
“You know what? That’s exactly what I did… Shit.” – cue the chorus of “oh geez”.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t say on the gas cap – in bold yellow English capital letters – “DIESEL FUEL ONLY”, or if it wasn’t printed on the key chain dangling from the ignition. It indeed was both of those things, and on this day I proved myself incompetent. Until of course, I went into crisis mode. Let me explain how I saved the day so you don’t believe I’m that much of a dumbass.
A traffic jam sprouted next to us while we sat anxiously hoping the professor’s car would figure out we weren’t still following them. Through the fog on the windows Emilia and I wrote “HELP! HELP! CHIAMA PER HELP!” to no avail. I hung my white undershirt out the window and people looked at us like we were just a bunch of silly Americans, but then I caught a middle-aged woman’s eye. I made the “call me” symbol with my hand, but she knew I wasn’t cougar hunting and I needed help. She hooked us up with some sort of Italian roadside assistance, which showed up some 20 minutes later. At this point, the Jumpy (van) that followed us into the shoulder had left to see if the other car got off at the next exit. Turns out they didn’t find it, and to make matters worse, they got lost trying to find their way back.
There I was, muttering less-than-broken Italian through the window at the men that came to help, praying for some kind of Italian fairy godmother to solve my problems with the language barrier. I spent 45 minutes struggling to express that we needed to call our professor, the house manager, or Avis to straighten things out. Therein I learned that bureaucracy is also a bitch in Italy and Switzerland, not just the states, because everybody filters out responsibility: SOME one had to shell out money for an international phone call (Italy to Switzerland), and once we could finally reach the last option (Avis), they wouldn’t help us without the license numbers of all three cars we rented. We did our best, and in the end the men felt bad enough to call a tow-truck and get us to the nearest garage. In time the Jumpy returned to find the six of us getting loaded up - IN THE CAR - onto the tow-truck. Dangerous ride, but it was actually pretty fun. We made it in one piece, and called the house manager to spread the word about my epic mistake. She made arrangements with the mechanics at the garage to get the car fixed, but we had to wait a day before heading off on the rest of our trip.
When our professor arrived, I was embarrassed but took the fall, and realized I’d miss out on one of the buildings I’d been looking forward to the entire time I was staying in Europe. There were no other options, and we had to move on. Ben volunteered to stay back and share the load on what would end up being a 7-hour trip to Nimes the following day. The rest of the class moved on to La Tourette, and we went home to enjoy a claaassic evening in Riva. We watched a movie, took a nap, contributed to a 1000 piece puzzle, ordered a pizza, made a fire, bumped some tunes, grabbed some beers at the Minibar, and called it a night. Maybe I didn’t save the day after all, and still look like an idiot, but it wasn’t all bad. The good news is that the dean of VT’s Architecture school made the exact same mistake years ago. In that respect I’m in good company.
