A date for the ages

A friend recently told me a great "date" story, which reminded me of this date I went on that I've been meaning to write down for some time:

I think it was around February 2008. She (we'll call her Hope) had never been to Philly before, so I thought it would be a fun date to surprise her by driving her there for an evening. I didn't tell her where we were going - just that we would leave late afternoon and wouldn't return until probably fairly late. In retrospect, since she didn't know me that well at the time, it's pretty amazing that she was willing to just get in my car and drive down the highway to who knows where. We got to Philly with no major issues, had a little trouble parking, and that's when the night really started to get interesting.

The first item on the agenda for the evening was to take her ice skating at the rink beneath the Benjamin Franklin bridge. Hope had mentioned she liked ice skating, but hadn't gone in a while because her friends and family hadn't wanted to go when she was home. I love ice skating (not that I'm any good), and I thought the prospect of taking a date to a rink outdoors, beneath a beautiful bridge would be awesome. We walked over to the rink, and it looked fantastic. The trouble was, apparently a school group had rented out the entire rink for the only time slot we could manage with our schedule, so we had to throw up our hands and walk back to my car. I was a little disappointed - it seemed like a great idea that had been spoiled by the unexpected.

This is where the fun really began. Believe it or not, I couldn't remember exactly where I had parked. (And if you know me well, this is not hard to believe at all). I think I was so excited about the date, it had not crossed my mind to memorize the street. We wandered around for quite some time, until it seemed like we were just walking in circles. Then I got the idea to grab a cab and have it drive us around the area - it seemed like a more efficient way to search for my car (plus it was cold, and Hope did not seem terribly comfortable hiking around in her shoes, even though she was playing it cool).

Once we got in the cab, we found my car literally only half a block away. How ridiculous!? I paid the cabbie, and then we crawled out and walked over to my car. As we neared my car I reached for my keys, only to realize that they were not there. I tried to play it cool, and wave down the cabbie, but he was already far down the street and didn't notice my motioning for him to stop. Apparently, I had taken the carabiner my keys were attached to off my belt loop before I paid, so I had put them down to grab my wallet. Then I just got out of the cab, taking for granted that my keys were securely hooked to my belt loop. But they were just loose at that point. Oops!

We discussed what to do on the street for a little while, and then decided to go to a bar down the street to get warm and come up with a plan. I was pretty frustrated, not only because I didn't have the keys to my car, but because we were supposed to be at a dinner with some friends soon, and I didn't want to miss that, but I also needed to get us home eventually (not to mention the first part of the evening had been somewhat of a disaster). We tried calling a few cab companies, but I was met with a half-hearted "good luck" by most of the phone receptionists. We couldn't even remember what color our cab had been. Who pays attention to that? And Philly is not like New York - there are lots of cab companies, and they each paint their cabs differently. We finally decided we thought it had maybe been yellow, but we kept second guessing ourselves since maybe we only thought the cab was yellow because we automatically visualize cabs as being yellow.

Eventually we decided to at least go to the dinner to salvage the evening. We could figure out how to get home later, or crash at my friend's place if absolutely necessary. To get to dinner, we had to catch a cab, so we decided we would at least try to catch a cab that vaguely reminded us of our first cab of the evening. We actually let a few available cabs go by, but then saw a yellow cab across the street. We waved at it, and even though it seemed like it wouldn't be able to make it across in such a short distance, it somehow precariously made it's way across several lanes to get to our side of the street. I opened the door and, remarkably, there were my car keys, laying there in the back seat! It seemed impossible. The cabbie had no idea the keys were even there. We were absolutely shocked. How on earth could we have hailed the exact same cab twice in the same evening? I gave the cabbie a tip just because, grabbed my keys, and then we just laughed and danced on the sidewalk for about ten minutes. It was quite the moment to share with someone.

The rest of the evening was fairly quiet- we had a nice dinner, with a great story to share, and then drove back home late in the night. And before things fell apart between Hope and me, we did manage a trip back to Philly to go ice skating. And it was terrific.