Day 29: Grand Theft Auto

Rest Day in Kansas City, MO

Yo yo yo! It’s Joseph, back at it again from Kansas City (the one in Missouri). I’m finally out of the trenches, and all my deep thoughts and introspection go to a complete halt unless I’m in complete misery and questioning my life. That’s why this time I’m doing a bit more of a silly blog. I’m sure as you will have heard from Greta (when she eventually publishes yesterday’s blog), we had a great learning festival followed by an awesome dinner out with some of the sponsors of the program we taught at. Meeting influential members of the Latino community anywhere is always a treat and our VIP level treatment has elevated Kansas City to my favorite stop on the trip so far. Kansas City continued to be a surreal trip even after last night, though.

We awoke with plans to go to The Children’s Place, a specialized trauma treatment center for very young children. The visit was set up by the aSteam Village sponsor. We were given a tour of the facility and then split up into groups of two or three to play with the children for an hour, followed by a little fireworks show. We weren’t allowed to take any photos and aren’t at liberty to talk about many details, but I can personally say that the kids were great and everyone had a blast. The adults there are doing some very important work and have my full respect.

We got back to our Airbnb and had a couple of hours to spare before our dinner plans with the learning festival sponsor, supposedly some amazing barbeque (Kansas City is known for it). Charles wanted to run some errands, so me and Ruth joined him. There were a few errands to run, but one was more important than the others. Enterprise said that we had to renew our car contract every thirty days and wow would you look at that we started Spokes a month ago! So, we drove to the nearest Enterprise thinking this would be a 15-minute errand. Then everything went wrong. For the past thirty-something days, our car rental process had gone too smoothly. No car breakdown or troubles with authorized drivers. Of course, all good things must come to an end. See, our 2024 Chrysler Pacifica had very recently been recalled due to a side airbag malfunction, along with 250,000 other Pacifica’s in Enterprise’s nationwide fleet. Enterprise told us we could keep the van until the end of our trip, but when it came time to renew our contract, the local branch said they could not renew a contract on a recalled vehicle. The only option here would be to get a replacement minivan and renew the contract with that, but it just so happens that those 250,000 Pacifica’s are most of Enterprise’s minivan fleet, so there were no available minivans or any seven-seater SUVs in the entire Kansas City area. We drove across state lines to two more Kansas City locations including the airport in an attempt to find an available vehicle, but no dice. At this point, our only option was to forego the Cambridge Enterprise’s pleas to get our car switched and continue on with the recalled Chrysler Pacifica with an overdue contract until we can eventually get it replaced, maybe in Denver… The legality of this decision is dubious. One might even say that we’ve committed Grand Theft Auto™.

After our quick errand turned wild goose chase, we came back to the AirBnB with nothing to show for our efforts. Our barbeque dinner with the sponsor was cancelled for unrelated reasons, but he instead generously doordashed us food from the barbeque place. It was quite delicious. The team all gathered together for our fourth iteration of the Spokes Movie Night, where we watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I had been wanting to watch the movie for quite some time now and I was not disappointed. The main female lead’s name in the movie was Ramona, so it became a running joke that our Ramona had seven evil exes and all that. The best thing to come out of it was probably the song in the movie called Ramona. I had the bright idea of making a three minute long edit with the song. Please enjoy the fruit of my labor.