“Relax, Life’s Too Short” - sign near Columbia, IN

Monday 2/27/2006 cont.

The army surplus store is just that. If I were interested in army surplus, this would be the place for me. Everything from army lunch bags to army body bags ($15. Another $8 gets you the plastic liner.) Donnie is at the counter chatting with a curly headed middle-aged woman.

“We get an auto-transport,” he says, almost cheerily.

“Oh yeah,” I say, thinking, what’s an auto transport?

“It’s the trailer as opposed to just the tow bar for the truck,” he answers my thoughts. “And the whole deal is about $600.”

“Nice,” I say, truthfully. The lady is smiling and pulling paperwork together.

“These walk-ins are always fun: so much paperwork.” We decide to get the insurance (a very good idea it turns out), and Donnie pays. We chitchat a bit with the lady, tell her we’re stranded just up the road at Tim’s Transmission in Edon.

“Ah yes,” she says, “the garden of Edon.”

Outside, I take a gander at the “auto-transport,” parked next to the bomb. The thing is a massive piece of hard-wear - chains and hitches and crank-lifts and grating like what semis pull, loaded down with the newest model vehicles.

As you know, Uhauls panel trucks have artwork on the side, usually depicting some interesting tourist site from one of the 50 states. Ours had the incredibly interesting Tennessee Cave Cricket.

Which is blind.

And lives in caves.

It takes us about 40 minutes if not longer to get the auto-transport hooked onto the Cricketmobile. The lady who had rented us the truck was not the owner of the surplus place; she was just covering a shift and decided to let us fend for ourselves as far as hooking the thing up. We end up having to cut the transport’s break lights down to bare wires to hook them to the Uhaul connectors (Donnie did it, I’m not sure how. Perhaps by sawing at them with his key, but more likely he bit through them when I wasn’t looking.)

Back on the road and headed back to Tim’s.