what i've been doing...

Had dinner with a cousin in CA recently.
Great time. Dinner and drinks, lots of catching up. Retrieving our cars from the parking garage I discovered I’d lost the keys to my rental car. While I spent 15 minutes ransacking my backpack, they locked the exit gate to the parking garage, so we now had NO car.
Decided to walk to my hotel (2-3 miles). Being directionally challenged I turned the wrong way and we walked about a half mile in the wrong direction.
It was late, so we bummed a ride with someone getting gas, but since that was almost doing something successfully, we cleverly left my cousin’s cell phone in her car to keep our stupidity streak going. Actually, to be fair up til then it had been solely *my* stupidity streak. But anyway, it sounds like we were both hammered, but let me assure you (Mom) that it was not so...

Anyway, the next day I discovered that:
a) Enterprise’s Loss/Damage Waiver doesn’t cover keys.
b) AAA will handle it (for a fee), but wanted to tow the car to the dealer first.
c) Late-model cars have really expensive high-security keys ($100 and up)
At lunch I went back to the restaurant where we’d eaten and found they had my key. I was so happy I asked the girl who gave it to me if she’d marry me, but she just laughed and assumed I was joking.
From now on when the car rental company gives me two keys, my policy is going to be to cut the little cord and save one key in a safe place. If they don’t like it, they can bite me.
Never did find the phone. The girl who has it is named Chevonne and she drives a yellow VW beetle; that’s pretty much all we know about that.
Asked around the next day and found out that if you drive up to the gate in the parking garage, it will open automatically to let you out. :-/
So that's the end of that story. Then I found five dollars.

Last week I stayed at the Historic Santa Maria Inn. They have stars on the doors telling the names of famous ppl who have stayed there; the ones in my hallway that I noticed were Rudolph Valentino, Kim Novak, Gregory Peck, Gloria Swanson, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau; my room had Clark Gable and Carol Lombard. So anyway, there’s that…