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I went to a Maelstrom Player Event hosted by Karion Darkclaw this weekend.
The event was good. There were shiny dragons and politics and card tricks and very beautiful countryside.
Unfortunately, on the way we met a bus which didn't understand lanes. In avoiding the bus, we encountered a telegraph pole. My car slid to a halt and leaked brake fluid everwhere in protest. After calling the AA using the phone of some nice gentlemen who stopped to see what was wrong, and thieving their warning triangle, we stood around and waited. (There were flowers attached to the crash barrier just by the telegraph pole that we hit. This made us somewhat glad to at least be alive.) And waited. It was cold. I got my dressing-gown out of the car and put it on over my clothes, and gave Bryony the spare jumper that Koryne had lent me. The lights on the car started to dim. We walked up the road a little way and hopped over the crash barrier, in order to not be on the road. The next two cars that stopped, we asked to call the police, and thieved another warning triangle for the other direction.
Eventually the police arrived. In fact, two sets of police arrived, as the two cars had phoned different police. The police tried to contact the AA to find out what was going on, but the AA had lost contact with their vehicle that they had sent to find us. One set of police went away. I filled in some forms, was breathalysed. Eventually we were invited to all sit in the police car, where it was warm, although none of us were allowed in the driver's seat. Which meant that three of us had to sit in the plastic seat moulded for two people, in the back of the car, where the doors don't open from the inside. We had the chocolate, but there was a little gap above the clear barrier between the back and front seats, through which we could pass bits to Tom, who was in the front passenger seat.
The AA reported that their contract garage had spent an hour looking for us and then given up, which we felt was rather unlikely given that we were rather obvious in the middle of a fairly short named A-road whose name we had given to the AA. The police phoned the youth hostel that the event was being held in, and some LARPers were dispatched to rescue us. The police said they would get their on-call garage to tow the car away so nobody else crashed into it.
We were rescued by some LARPers. They were nice, although both cars did get somewhat lost on the way back to the hostel. We were fed chocolate brownies and soup. I didn't get any soup because by the time I had put my stuff in my room, I wanted to fall asleep Right Now, so I did.
The next day, there was a lot of faff, mostly to do with payphones. I managed to get Tom to do most of the talking to people, which was helpful, as I am not good at talking to people on phones, especially confusing bleepy phones. We managed to extract from the police the name and phone number of the people who had finally taken my car away. We managed to extract from them that they were charging me a lot of money for the privilege of having my car taken away. We attempted to phone Nicholas through various means a few times, then gave up and phoned Rosemary instead because she was likely to be able to share the information around best.
Eventually, throughout the event (Karion's dracoscions kept calling me away because the phone was ringing again), things got sorted out, mostly due to my father, who is wonderful, and said he'd drive up (all the way from Essex to North Wales!) to sort everything out and bring us all home. Although my car was only a borderline write-off, it being in a recoverer's yard in North Wales meant that the additional faff of getting it somewhere closer would bring the expense up to far more than the car's replacement value, so we sadly decided to let it be scrapped.
Now I am home again and have a rather nasty cold. :(
(Interestingly: everyone assumed that I would be very shaken up by the whole affair. I did pretend to be, because it meant that other people would take charge and deal with things like people stopping to see if we were okay, and phoning people, but mostly I was just vaguely irritated that my car was broken, rather than actually scared or in shock at any point.)
The event was good. There were shiny dragons and politics and card tricks and very beautiful countryside.
Unfortunately, on the way we met a bus which didn't understand lanes. In avoiding the bus, we encountered a telegraph pole. My car slid to a halt and leaked brake fluid everwhere in protest. After calling the AA using the phone of some nice gentlemen who stopped to see what was wrong, and thieving their warning triangle, we stood around and waited. (There were flowers attached to the crash barrier just by the telegraph pole that we hit. This made us somewhat glad to at least be alive.) And waited. It was cold. I got my dressing-gown out of the car and put it on over my clothes, and gave Bryony the spare jumper that Koryne had lent me. The lights on the car started to dim. We walked up the road a little way and hopped over the crash barrier, in order to not be on the road. The next two cars that stopped, we asked to call the police, and thieved another warning triangle for the other direction.
Eventually the police arrived. In fact, two sets of police arrived, as the two cars had phoned different police. The police tried to contact the AA to find out what was going on, but the AA had lost contact with their vehicle that they had sent to find us. One set of police went away. I filled in some forms, was breathalysed. Eventually we were invited to all sit in the police car, where it was warm, although none of us were allowed in the driver's seat. Which meant that three of us had to sit in the plastic seat moulded for two people, in the back of the car, where the doors don't open from the inside. We had the chocolate, but there was a little gap above the clear barrier between the back and front seats, through which we could pass bits to Tom, who was in the front passenger seat.
The AA reported that their contract garage had spent an hour looking for us and then given up, which we felt was rather unlikely given that we were rather obvious in the middle of a fairly short named A-road whose name we had given to the AA. The police phoned the youth hostel that the event was being held in, and some LARPers were dispatched to rescue us. The police said they would get their on-call garage to tow the car away so nobody else crashed into it.
We were rescued by some LARPers. They were nice, although both cars did get somewhat lost on the way back to the hostel. We were fed chocolate brownies and soup. I didn't get any soup because by the time I had put my stuff in my room, I wanted to fall asleep Right Now, so I did.
The next day, there was a lot of faff, mostly to do with payphones. I managed to get Tom to do most of the talking to people, which was helpful, as I am not good at talking to people on phones, especially confusing bleepy phones. We managed to extract from the police the name and phone number of the people who had finally taken my car away. We managed to extract from them that they were charging me a lot of money for the privilege of having my car taken away. We attempted to phone Nicholas through various means a few times, then gave up and phoned Rosemary instead because she was likely to be able to share the information around best.
Eventually, throughout the event (Karion's dracoscions kept calling me away because the phone was ringing again), things got sorted out, mostly due to my father, who is wonderful, and said he'd drive up (all the way from Essex to North Wales!) to sort everything out and bring us all home. Although my car was only a borderline write-off, it being in a recoverer's yard in North Wales meant that the additional faff of getting it somewhere closer would bring the expense up to far more than the car's replacement value, so we sadly decided to let it be scrapped.
Now I am home again and have a rather nasty cold. :(
(Interestingly: everyone assumed that I would be very shaken up by the whole affair. I did pretend to be, because it meant that other people would take charge and deal with things like people stopping to see if we were okay, and phoning people, but mostly I was just vaguely irritated that my car was broken, rather than actually scared or in shock at any point.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 12:41 pm (UTC)From:Did the police want to find the bus?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 12:56 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 12:47 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 01:03 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 01:08 pm (UTC)From:Do we know what became of the bus?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 01:16 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 03:46 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 03:49 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 05:10 pm (UTC)From:Hopefully your car was *insured* and you won't actually have to pay for any of this...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 05:12 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 05:39 pm (UTC)From:I'm glad you're all right, but it sucks that the car is wrecked.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 09:42 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)Abner
True adventure.
Date: 2006-03-16 10:36 am (UTC)From: