silly song<\/a> they were playing about a man who lost his wristwatch playing hopscotch with a Sasquatch in a tree crotch.<\/p>\nSuddenly, the car started slowing down. <\/p>\n
“Odd,” I thought, “The cruise control just turned itself off. Wait a moment. The accelerator isn’t working. The car’s broken down? Oh, god! I haven’t… oh, no, I have! Am I really that stupid? Yes, I am! I’ve run out of petrol.”<\/p>\n
I couldn’t believe I had done something that dumb; I wasn’t watching the dashboard, and I didn’t think to check the fuel gauge.<\/p>\n
I glided to a safe spot at the side of the road and sat for a bit. I listened to the end of the radio show as I collected myself. I ate a picnic lunch as I planned how to solve the problem. Then I dressed warmly, filled my pockets with whatever supplies I had, and started walking to the petrol station I had passed about five kilometres earlier. <\/p>\n
Did that part of Canada have any wildlife I had to watch out for? Any biting insects? Nettles? Bears? Snakes? I didn’t know, but I hoped not!<\/p>\n
After trudging for ages, I tried to explain to the petrol station attendant (who, of course, only spoke French) that I needed to borrow a jerry can. I got nowhere, until some kind soul in the queue that was forming behind me complained at her bitterly in French. She relented and helped me out.<\/p>\n
With a heavy can of petrol in hand, I started trudging back.<\/p>\n
I sometimes pick up hitchhikers, but I have never been a hitchhiker. I don’t know; it just seems more dangerous to be picked up than to pick up. So, I didn’t have my thumb out as I walked back. A car pulled over anyway. It was a clapped-out, old rust-bucket, and the driver called me over and told me to get in; he’d give me a lift to my car. I was a bit unsure, but it was a long hike, the can was heavy, I was tiring out and I still didn’t know whether I needed to worry about being eaten by a bear. I accepted.<\/p>\n
The driver was an excitable, young Lebanese man. He started telling me happily about his job. <\/p>\n
He worked at the local abattoir. <\/p>\n
Somehow, that’s not what you want to hear when you are hitchhiking and feeling a little vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Part of his job was inspecting that the meat was halal – conforming to Islamic dietary requirements. If the meat passed the inspection, he put his mark on the corpse with a stamp.<\/p>\n
“Here, I will show you!” he said, and started rummaging through the mess of items shoved between his dashboard and the windscreen. Eventually, he pulled out a little hand-stamp covered in (what I hope was) blood-red ink. “This is what I stamp the corpses with.”<\/p>\n
My bizarre-o-meter was flashing red. By this stage, I was ready to jump out of the car and take my chances with the bears. <\/p>\n
In the end, however, I am grateful to him. He did me a big favour, getting me back to my car, snakebite-free and blood-red-stamp-marks-free.<\/p>\n
And so I continued my journey…<\/p>\n
…checking my fuel gauge every 20 seconds for the rest of the trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I dressed warmly, filled my pockets with whatever supplies I had, and started walking <\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
My bizarre-o-meter was flashing red. By this stage, I was ready to jump out of the car and take my chances with the bears. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,41],"tags":[106,262,177],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-story-telling","tag-anecdote","tag-canada","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}