Crash Into You

I had a nice week at the Crash Pad Hostel in Chattanooga. It was a slow week in Chattanooga so I pretty much had the whole place to myself. Chattanooga is growing on me although I might get bored there pretty quick. Seems like most people there are either young or married, neither of which are in my future that I can see.

The Hostel was booked up over the weekend due to a Science Fiction Convention in town. With the impending onslaught of Nerdom, I decided to continue my exploration of the Appalachian Southeast and got out of town.

After a couple of days driving through the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina before ending up back in Greenville, SC. Which is also on my list of possible places to settle down in. It was a long couple of days drive and I was looking forward to settling into a hotel room to rest up before heading downtown to see what Greenville does for Saturday night fun. It was too early to check in so I stopped in at a shopping center to hang out at the REI and a nice big Barnes and Noble. Seems like Greenville’s Saturday fun includes a stop at the mall because it was busy and crowded.

After an hour or so it was finally time to check in. Another group of folks at the B&N were on the same schedule because we went to our car and backed out of our parking spots at exactly the same time. My new car has a reverse camera and sensors so I saw that they were getting close. I stopped and honked but their sensors must not have been annoying enough cause they

kept coming until I heard the crunch of plastic.

The trailer is in storage but I still have the receiver ball on. I have been thinking about pulling it off to make it easier to parallel park but luckily my procrastination paid off. The receiver took the impact and held strong. It did leave a nice 2 inch circular puncture in the other car’s plastic bumper.

We went through all of the usual insurance stuff and went our separate ways.

A couple of hours later, I had dropped my stuff at the hotel and headed out for dinner and a walk around. My westward freeway drive was slow going because there was a concert or something going on downtown and the setting Sun was making it hard to see. Stop and start traffic. Except for that one time where I was stopped and the guy behind me was started. This time it was a pretty hard bang but I still hadn’t removed the hitch ball. I did feel a little twinge in my neck from that one but I think I and my car came out ok. The other car had a now familiar circular puncture in the bumper though.

I am glad I kept that hitch on. I bet the damage to my bumper would be in the thousands and two rear end crashes in a couple of hours would raise some eyebrows around Geico’s next insurance rate setting meeting.