Travel Horror Story: Job Interview Trip to Leander, Texas

I’m a neurotic traveler.

I make sure that everything is exhaustively Mapquested, Google Mapped, and triangulated beyond all reasonable doubt. I want my car, a trusty Toyota Corolla, to have a fresh oil change and all of its cupholders loaded with healthy snacks and refreshing beverages. I keep all my paperwork for the trip, navigational and otherwise, organized at my side in the front passenger seat, often paperclipped for my convenience.

I’ve seen way too many horror movies that begin with a couple, or a lone attractive woman, becoming lost on a cross-country journey.

They, or she, wind up off-course on some desolate back road, the car mysteriously running into some roadway debris, puncturing a tire or a fuel line. The car stops shortly thereafter, stranding the good-looking, urbanite traveler(s) in a backwoods freak show, terrorized by hillbilly cannibal mechanics and their inbred families.

Cell service? Not to be found. The local sheriff? Likely in on the corrupt/horrifying organ theft conspiracy, drug den butchery, or snuff film operation at the run-down motel. Locals who may help you escape? Don’t count on it.

Obviously, my mind runs amok about 37% of the day, but it increases to about 92% of the time whenever I aim my four-cylinder steed into uncharted waters. After passing through Abilene I was in such territory, not knowing if what appeared on my Mapquest printout would be accurate enough to keep me from being an unwitting star in a D-I-Y horror flick.

Well, on that fateful trip to Austin, I got lost.

Took a right when I should’ve taken a slight right.

Twenty miles down the road I got worried and called someone with an Internet connection to log on and verify that the highway I was on was headed to the next town. They determined that I had taken a wrong path…and I instantly pulled a U-turn so magnificent that it left molten rubber smoking in the setting sun.

I eventually made it to Austin, but my irrational fears of horror-movie endings to wrong turns on our nation’s rural highways will likely continue. I should either stop watching such movies or invest in a satellite phone…probably the latter…


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