A Trip to a Foreign Country

We didn’t intend to stray into new territory. I just needed to have my tires rotated and my oil changed. (I never have understood having to have my tires rotated. Don’t they rotate every time I drive?) Just a simple, everyday (well, every 5,000 miles) errand. No big deal. Wallet, cell phone, thermos of tea, two masks each — just the normal stuff.

I went to the dealer because I thought I was still on that sweet free service thing that they sell you when you buy even a used car. After we sat in the waiting room for an hour, the service manager came over with a list of things they thought the car needed. The total came to $1,200. I didn’t panic. I laughed. We pared the list down to $431.56, and we settled in to wait some more.

I would just like to point out that my car is nine years old, and this was its 40,000 mile check-up. I guess you might say we don’t drive much.

Three episodes of “Tiny House” later, the car finally appeared, and I settled the bill. $200 of it was labor. Somehow I have my doubts that the mechanics are paid $67/hour, so I think the dealership just made some very nice profit on me. I will not go there again.

So now it was after 5 PM, we hadn’t eaten all day, and there was a Cracker Barrel three miles away. Did we dare? We hadn’t been out alone in a restaurant for almost a year. We had lunch just before we got married on March 4, 2020. It was now February 17, 2021. We’ve done take out, and we briefly considered that, but we were far enough away from home that the food…