Last Wednesday night Otis and I hit the road for a 17 hour road trip to Knoxville, TN for my cousin's wedding in which I was the Matron Senora of Honor. I've decided to change it to Senora of Honor, because matron is just a horrible word. Nobody ever means that word in a nice way. When you say someone is matronly, you're not giving them a compliment.

About 3 hours into the road trip (10:45pm) I was trying to get some sleep so I could take the next shift, when all of a sudden Otis slammed on the brakes. I popped my head up to see what we were about to hit when I saw a flash of whitish-brown fur fly across the windshield and heard a thud from the drivers side of the car.

"What just happened?"

(Surprisingly calmly) "We hit a deer."

(Trying not to freak out) "ok. ok. ok."

Otis pulled the car off the road in the nearest safe spot he could find and we got out to inspect the car. Here's what we found:

We decided the car was undriveable and began our search for a place to stay, figuring it would be fairly challenging in the tiny East Texas town of Palestine. We finally found a Holiday Inn Express, but were quickly told by the weird front desk lady it was booked, probably with hunters judging by the number of trucks in the parking lot. East Texas is deer hunting country. Clearly the hunters need to try a little harder.

After finding out the hotel was full, we decided it would be best to try driving to a larger town that would have better lodging/car rental/body shop choices. So, we grabbed the iBook and headed back into the hotel to see if we could use their wireless internet to do some research.

Me: "Hi. It's us again. Can we use our laptop to connect to your wireless internet and find a place to stay?"

Weird hotel lady, as she points to the iBook: "Oh, do you have one of those windowless computers?"

Me: "Um, actually yes. And it's also wireless."

She reluctantly granted us permission to use the invisible internet connection on our "windowless" computer. Except it didn't work, so we gave up and used the old fashioned method of a road atlas and some luck, hoping we would find something 50 miles away in Tyler.

Turns out we didn't need technology after all. We found a hotel, body shop, and rental car place all within 2 miles of each other in Tyler. We ended up with a sweet 2007 VW Passat with leather until our car is fixed. The Mazda is getting fixed in Tyler, and the insurance is paying for it. So far the estimate is around $5000.

I'll leave you with some of the stupid questions we've received during this experience, and the answers I would have liked to give to them:

Q: Did you file a police report?
A: Um, no. Why? If I had who would you have charged? Because it was clearly the deer's fault. She ran into us, and we totally had the right of way.

Q: Who's insurance is this going on?
A: The deer's. It's totally going on the deer's.

Q: So, did you pick it (the deer) up and take it to a processing plant?
A: Um, no, because I could totally see a scene from Tommy Boy playing out in the back of our car if we had.