It was a rough ending to our first week on the job. On Thursday, Linsey decided to ride her bike to work from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti with one of her co-workers. She had to travel back to Ann Arbor in the afternoon since her co-worker left before she did. Since she was unfamiliar with the park trails that she took to get there, I told her I would pick her up after I left Botsford for the day. As I came to a stop at the exit of 275 after getting out of work, I suddenly heard a very familiar sound. It all too closely resembled the noise a pot of water makes when boiling pasta for dinner. I checked the temperature gauge and sure enough the needle was rising before my eyes. I knew I only had a few more minutes to go before it hit the red-line, so I pulled into a gas station and waited for a few minutes. After it cooled down, I drove the mile I had left to Linsey's workplace, picked her up and parked in the back of the lot to wait for my temper as well as the cars to cool down. The PT Cruiser hasn't been very nice to us lately. We thought it was fixed a long time ago, but the door ajar light keeps coming on at random times. If I press the rear defroster button it will lock the doors, turn on the defrosters and turn on or off the door light. We have to keep the doors unlocked all the time or else it thinks that someone is breaking in and the alarm goes off. The things possessed. We spent $150 to get it checked out in Mt. Pleasant and found out we had a bad ground on a speaker wire. It was doing fine until the same day we moved to AA. Go figure.
     Anyway, after calling a half dozen shops who were all closed for the day, we finally got hold of Mel from Mel's Auto in Depot Town. He was only a half mile away so we drove down there and parked the PT in a shady little alleyway behind some shops on Cross Street. Mel was a really nice older black man, wearing greasy coveralls and spoke with a deep southern accent. He had us pull the car up to the garage and after giving it a quick look-over said that we would probably have to leave it there for the night. Mel was kind enough to give us a phone book where we looked up the number to the local Blue Cab company to get a ride back to Ann Arbor. The cabbie who picked us up was a middle-aged guy named Calvin. He had quite a few interesting stories to tell us on the way. Everything from his run ins with gangsters over in Detroit to shuttling around prostitutes to the UAW parties.
    We arrived back to our apartment later in the evening and were slightly stressed out so we did the one thing that usually always makes us feel better, eat good food. Across the street from our apartment is a Mediterranean restaurant called Ali Babas. We had never been there, but read the reviews online and found it to have decent ratings. It turned out to be a great choice. We ordered an appetizer of tabbouli, hommous, baba ghanouge and pitas, then Linsey had the house special, beef shawarma and I had sujuk. It definitely hit the spot but unfortunately our problems were not over.
     The next morning Linsey took the bus to work so that I could use her car for the commute up to Novi. I walked down the alley to where Linsey had left her car and soon realized that it was not there anymore. After calling the police, I found out that it had been impounded for being parked where it shouldn't have been. We missed the invisible sign that said you can't park there). So, at the end of the day it was $92 to replace a few hoses and the PT's thermostat, $22 for the taxi ride home the previous day, $60 fine for parking on the road with the invisible sign and $190 to get Linsey's car out of impound. Not to mention I had to call Botsford my first week on the job and tell them I couldn't make it. To release a little stress I went out for a bike ride after I called in to work. Christina, a new found fellow triathlon junkie from Botsford told me about a road (Huron River) that a lot of cyclists use in the summertime, so I went out for a 24 mile ride. It was great, not too many hills as most of AA is and it somewhat reminded me of the Bayshore Marathon course in Traverse city, as it followed the Huron River northwest towards Dexter. I'm planning on doing the 54 mile round trip bike ride to work and back on Monday so I wanted to get in a short ride Friday.
     Saturday, we went to the farmers market in the morning, meijers for groceries in the afternoon and then Whole Foods afterwards to pick up some cheese and bread for grilled cheese sandwiches. Today we started some laundry and then went on a bike ride to find a park to sling the old ball around. We were heading up near the hospital where there is a large park with an outdoor pool but took a few wrong roads and ended up at Hunt Park off of Sunset Road. It was a very small park with a soccer field which we played catch on, a small restroom/pavilion, child's jungle gym thing and a very odd "wet spot" which was a large round spot of brown soaking earth, that according to the sign next to it, was eventually going to be planted with some native species of plants. See picture below.
     After returning to the apartment, we decided that we wanted a slurpee from 7-Eleven, but after finding out that not one of the 114,000 people who live in Ann Arbor ever decided to open a 7-Eleven; we walked a few blocks to Washtenaw Dairy, a small ice-cream/donut/convenience store that has been around for the last 75 years. It was great, I had a double scoop of Mackinaw Isle Fudge in a waffle cone and Linsey had a Lemon Custard Shake. Won't be getting that much ice-cream again for a long time.

1 Comment

1. Unknown on May 24, 2010 at 10:16 AM

   Hello Schultzgroves!
   You might consider turning your experiences into a best seller. Lots of excitement and entertainment! I think we'll have to visit the Washtenaw Dairy and Ali Babas when we come to see you. Very good reviews! We will be interested to see how your 54 mile bike ride went.Let's hope this week is a much, much better one!!