A JOURNEY TO THE UNITED KINGDOM
Entry Thirteen

Now at the St Louis airport baggage claim, Mat grabs the automated mixing board off the conveyer belt as the front lid pops off- talk about a close call. We will be getting that baby back in the shock mount case as soon as we get home. The wooden faceplate Troy screwed on the front of his amp is barely hanging on one side and it is cracked on the other. Something whacked the heck out of it. I can’t wait to check the tubes. We collect the van out of long term parking which I am proud of myself for being able to find. It only takes one time of loosing that little ticket stub with all the valuable information about which lot, row number and such before you learn to file it away in a memorable location!! I can’t believe how good it feels to be in our comfortable seats complete with butt warmers, electric everything and no clutch that I still managed to feel around for. We are feeling a little shot for the drive home but it is not uneventful. We have quite the show with a car chase scene happening across the median. I see a white blazer fly by with sparks flying followed by a trail of highway patrol and then we pass by the officers rolling up the spike strip thing that just took out the guys tires. That manages to keep me up for awhile- just like watching Court TV. We drop Mat and Shannon off in Columbia and Troy and I wrap up the drive to Moberly. We make it there and are asleep by 3am. The alarm goes off four hours later. Vacation time is up and it’s time to go back to my day job- the one that will pay for my credit card bills as they roll in from this trip.
Those bills do finally start to trickle in. Remember the phone calls that I tried unsuccessfully to place in Amsterdam, and all over England. Well, thank goodness I could only call from my last day in Paris, because that bill was $150.00 (for two fifteen min. calls and one answering machine hang-up… OOOPS!!!) Then about a month later I get a letter, which I figure out is written in Dutch. What at first glance looks like a check is indeed a ticket. I guess our 3:30am departure from Amsterdam to the ferry was a little too quick. We did get there mighty early. Well, this particular camera says I was only going 5km over which turns out to only cost 17 euros (why would they even bother). It costs $17 just to wire transfer it to their bank which I had to do because it took them so long to track me down. A couple more weeks go by and I get some more correspondence from Amsterdam- I am starting to recognize their stationary- this is bad. As far as I can make out, another one is for speeding 14km over: which is 40 euros. The dreadful one is for a traffic light violation and is a hefty 130 euros. I ask Mat if he remembers a red light since he was the only other one awake. I sure don’t remember any flashing going on. He thinks it was in the confusion of a u-turn after we discovered we had been going the wrong way on a highway. I decide to try my hand at appeals and see if they will grant this foreigner a break. After all that would go a long way towards the coveted GPS system that would have made this journal half- as- long!