Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a catchy title that summed up the various threads that woven together will comprise this post, so I stole a little from Radio’s post on the same subject.

The Moosemobile is the name that Big J (“He’s big, and his name’s J“) gave to my car, in reference to an old nickname for me that he still uses, Moosedog.  (Now you know what that little drawing at the side of the Meddysong logo is )

I started to refer to my car as The Moosemobile as an occasional joke, unaware that Radio had absorbed it and would soon start to call The Moosemobile herself, a fact that struck home when I saw it in print on her blog.

Anyway, this story revolves around my failure to read something the other night.

I hadn’t spent any private time with Radio the weekend before, since we were attending the birthday party of her great-aunt.  I offered to come up and visit her in the week instead.

Her sister had a Dutch class that night, so I had offered to take her home at the end of her lesson.

After a hectic day, I headed off, hoping to miss the traffic.  Before too long, I was in Birmingham, trying to locate a car park.  I soon found myself not far from one that Radio and I had used, so my mind was made up.  I followed the traffic around, and had to cut through the outer lane of a roundabout to enter.

Several hours later, at 21:54, we had a nasty surprise, when we were greeted by the sight of locked gates at the top of the entrance ramp. It didn’t take a genius to work out that The Moosemobile was going to be spending the night in strange company. Sure enough, we saw a sign on the wall, indicating the opening hours of the car park … and, more importantly, the closing hours. 21:00.

Radio jumped to the quick thinking: “If we run there’s still time for you to get the 22:15 [train] back.”

I had another idea. Seeing as I would still have to get back in Birmingham early enough to be able to drive back to Leicester for 8:30 the following morning, and that this would rack up a train fare for that night and another rush-hour one for the following morning, I announced that I would stay in a hotel.

This is quite unusual for me, going on past form. In November of 2005 I travelled to New York via Amsterdam. Our connecting flight was late leaving, since the exterior of the plane had a dent in it, having been struck by something mid flight. In accordance with procedure, a government official had to come out to certify that the damage was only superficial, so we had a delay of a few hours.

Add to this delay the hours it takes to get through American passport control. I know very well why they’re so vigilant, but I fail to see why they have to be so rude and stupid whilst going about their work. The chap that I spoke to asked me, oh, three times whether I was visiting for business or pleasure. I told him the address of the friend that I was visiting, even giving him the zip code, but he tenaciously kept on with the questioning, desperate to hear me say “OK, you got me. I came to destroy the last bastion of freedom.”

All in all, I was now hours behind schedule.

What further hindered me was the deceptively large size of New York. The journey from the airport to central NYC took hours. In England travelling for that long will get you from one end to the other. I was expecting a much shorter journey.

So far my problems number three:

1) Flight from Amsterdam delayed by a few hours owing to a UFO breaking through the plane’s outer casing.

2) I had the bad luck to meet Idiot McPassport at a time when he didn’t feel the need to purge himself on doughnuts, so it took me a few years to navigate the two feet from one side of his cubicle to the other.

3) New York is larger in area than England, which I hadn’t factored into my calculations when I assumed that it would take only an hour to get from the airport to NYC.

Add to these a fourth:

4) The people at Penn Street didn’t know their arse from their elbow.

My friend, Andrew, lived in upstate New York. We had arranged between us that I would need to get the “Amtrak” from Penn Street. So I got to Penn Street sometime in the evening and looked for this mysterious Amtrak. No luck, so I asked some of the people who worked there, who sent me off somewhere else.

I arrived at this somewhere else, only to come up stuck. Like a fool, I asked for help, and was sent back the way I came. Repeat this twice. A sends me to B, who sends me back to A, who tells me “Bro, I’m tellin’ ya, it’s back by B”, only for me to be told by B that she has worked there for years, and it’s definitely by A.

Anybody that knows me will attest that I have a hell of a temper. I’m not quite at Iron Sheik levels of volatility, but it’s not far off. Well, I wanted to explode here, especially when I later saw that it was right by B all along.

She worked in a booth. Had I walked past it and taken the corner, I’d have seen the big sign with Amtrak written on it. It turns out that the Amtrak is a private train line, and this cabbage had led me up the garden path. It also transpired that I’d missed the last train by a matter of minutes. I’d have been fine had B not sent me away twice. Fucker.

Well, I was immensely angry, my first day in New York seeing me homeless. If you’ve ever seen footage of Times Square for new year, you’ll know that snow isn’t an unknown phenomenon in NYC. I was in for a cold night.

My approach was pretty straightforward: There was no way I was going to pay a tonne of money for a hotel, an attempt to catch a taxi resulted in a confused driver having to pull out a state map before announcing that Hudson was 120 miles away and would set me back a few hundred dead presidents.

Nothing if not pragmatic, I made my mind up on what to do next. I reasoned that if I were going to be spending the night in the streets, I would need to keep warm and be at my most aggressive, in case anyone started on me. I decided that the best way to meet these ends would be to get pissed up, and headed for a bar.

For once my luck was in: The bar I went into sold Stella Artois. If any drink in the universe can get the pulse charging and fists flying, this is it. It cost something ridiculous ($7?) a pint, but I drank seven of them anyway, getting a few funny looks from people when I polished off the first in a couple of gulps.

Anyway, I spent the one of the most miserable nights of my life sleeping on a floor near the Amtrak station. (Incredibly, I’ve spent even colder and lonelier nights on the streets before, hence my avoidance of the superlative there.)

Some jabroni cannon fodder kicked me awake at one point, telling me that there was a zero-tolerance attitude to the homeless.

“I’ve got a fucking home, but it’s a few thousand miles away, you twat!”

I couldn’t help it. I was sleeping in my best jacket, and these two brain-donators had mistaken me for a bum and woken me with their boots. My next comment was a bizarre “Where’s my fucking girlfriend?” Not only had I travelled alone; I had been single for over three years at that point. I guess they must have awoken me during a dream.

Recounting this story to my friend Adderz, he had to laugh. “It’s amazing how your brain works, Moosedog. The rest of us would have spent whatever was necessary to get a roof over our heads. You automatically decide that you’re going to be homeless, and work around that instead.”

I suppose he’s right.

Anyway, back to the present. Having lost The Moosemobile overnight, I find myself in a similar quandary to that I experienced in New York. A few years older, it would appear that I’ve changed my approach, since I now decide that I will eschew the streets in favour of a hotel.

Radio was doing the Catholic guilt thing, repeatedly saying that she was sorry and somehow convincing herself that my failure to read a sign that I couldn’t have seen whilst cutting lanes anyway was her fault. Her sister, call her Wireless, was doing her best impression, also expressing her sentiments of regret that she had somehow caused the gates to magically close.

I bade them farewell and headed off to find myself a roof under which to sleep. As my bad luck would have it, the first hotel I tried was fully booked. The nice woman serving took pity on me and rang around. No luck anywhere, which is just as well, since the lowest price any of them were operating at was £89, the presence of comedian Lee Evans being responsible for the hike in prices and the lack of rooms.

I had flashbacks to New York.

There was but one hotel untried. The young lady shrugged her shoulders and said that it wasn’t worth trying, since it was too far away. “How far?” “About ten to fifteen minutes on foot.”

Ha! I’ve done about four hours’ walking during the last three days as a form of lazy man’s exercise. I’m sure I could cope with a mere fifteen minutes.

Bullseye! Not only were there rooms, but the cost was £38. I was saved at last, and shall e’ermore be grateful to the etap chain.

I awoke at 06:30 the next morning, retrieved The Moosemobile, and headed back to Leicester, where all went swimmingly thereafter.

In fact, the best part of the whole saga was that the irrationally guilt-stricken Radio bought me a superb book on maths to say sorry.

If this is my reward, I ought to make mistakes more often

Tags: Moosemobile

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