Travel Missteps: Where’s Dad?

A lot of my family lives in Kansas. It is around an 8 hour drive from Colorado to Kansas, and so I’ve become a conquerer of the rest/truck stops and restaurants along our route from years of making that road trip. However, one place my father refuses to go back to is the KFC in Fort Hays, KS. To say he had a bad experience is a bit of an understatement.

It started out like a normal stop. We were hungry, and there aren’t a whole lot of healthy options that are quick, because we’ve learned who really wants to waste an hour or more at a sit down restaurant when you still have 4 plus hours of driving to do. So we decided to check out the two story KFC in Fort Hays. (It says a lot, when a two story restaurant is a novelty on your road trip.)

As per usual Dad made a bee line for the bathrooms as we went to order. We ordered, got the food, and sat down. Starving, we just dug in. But as we were eating, Dad still didn’t appear. We figured that maybe he was having stomach problems and so didn’t want to bother him by calling or knocking on the bathroom door. So we continued to happily eat without him. But then we finished our meal, while his was getting cold. “He’s been gone a long time?” We remarked. But still we waited, not wanting to bother him. We ended up going back and ordering dessert, and ate that too. It now was almost an hour since we arrived, not the quick stop we had anticipated. We tried calling his cell to check on him…but he didn’t pick up.

Still, we weren’t extremely worried, we just hoped he was going to feel good enough to continue on the road. Finally, Dad appeared sweaty, pale, and aggregated. When we asked if he was okay, he just sat down without a word and ate.

Once he finished his (now cold) meal. He took a deep breath and explained what had happen. After coming out of the bathroom, the handle of the door got caught on the belt loop on the back of his pants, pinning him to the door. Try as he might, he couldn’t unhook himself, so he stood helplessly, waiting for someone…anyone…to come rescue him. We asked “Why didn’t you call!” And he remarked that he had left his cell in the car. Because the bathrooms were in a not-highly-trafficked area, he waited nearly 45 minutes until another man came to use the bathroom. He said it was incredibly awkward to ask the guy to help twist and hoist him off of the door handle. He then asked us why we didn’t go looking for him, that he felt so helpless, and wondered if we had just left without him. To which we explained we just thought he was sick. We felt sorry for him, but the way he told the story of how helpless he was…waiting…almost loosing hope…we couldn’t stop laughing. Although Dad didn’t find it as funny as we did.

A year or so later it almost happened again to my father in the same restaurant, but after a few minutes my mom as a joke went to go check on him, and help release him from the door handle’s grip on his belt loops. After that he refused to ever stop at that location again. We now joke every time he leaves that we’ll send out a search party if he’s not back in 5 minutes.