We were a thousand miles from home when the car gave up the ghost.

But to be honest, I was surprised we made it as far as we did.

My old Nissan had been on the life support for the better part of the last decade.

Now that it was dead, I almost felt relief.

Like the machine could finally be at peace in the great afterlife parking lot in the sky.

Of course, that relief was easily outweighed by the newfound panic of being stranded in

the middle of an unfamiliar nowhere.

Ferry was under the hood doing everything short of dark magic to get the engine running again.

While I paced the road with a cell phone over my head, hoping for a single bar of connectivity

and feeling about as useful as male nipples.

This certainly wasn't the highlight of our cross-country road trip, but it wasn't the

worst moment either.

That particular honor fell upon the roadside marsupial petting zoo.

To be fair, this was taking my mind off of all those things I'd left back home, which

was the entire purpose of this surprise vacation, after all.

That's what my friends called it.

A surprise vacation.

Their delicate phrasing conjured a much kinder image of what turned out to be a low-key

kidnapping.

I got home from my overnight shift to find them all waiting for me in my living room, intervention

style.

My roommate, Jerry, the mastermind behind it all, had two go-bags waiting by the front

...