Post 20: WE GOT THE KNOCK

Day 21: 3/11/22 3:47am

2:22 am and we got our first knock!

This guy knocked pretty darn hard too, and that scared the crap out of both of us! Once we realized what was happening, Zak peeked his head out of the back window to make sure that The Knocker was uniformed, and then threw on some clothes. I, on the other hand, couldn’t be bothered to put on pants, so I covered up with a blanket and stayed in bed with Auggie to try to keep her calm.

When Zak went up there, I think the guard thought that it was only Zak sleeping in the van, so he told Zak that he had to leave. The guard suggested another rest stop on the other side of the bridge.

However, when I finally got on pants and got in the front seat to move, the guard saw us again and stopped us! He said that he didn’t realize that Zak had “a family” and told us the place that he had suggested Zak to go was not a particularly safe/ nice place to be… LOL. So, he told us to stay, but just to move over by the semis/ in a different spot.

So, we moved to the front corner of the lot over by the semis, per his instructions, and wouldn’t ya know it?! As we were parking, we saw him quickly walking towards us, at LEAST a quarter of a mile away! So, to save him the extra walking (he obviously wanted to talk to us again) we un-parked from the spot (can one un-park from a spot?) and drove over. At this point, though, we were thinking that this super nice guy was also a little bit crazy and not worth the trouble, so we were just going to tell him that we were going to sleep at my brothers’ house in Tampa.

When we finally got to him, he told us that “bad people” came to the rest stop last Sunday and broke windows right where we were about to park, and we should come stay in front of the guard station. He told us that he had 6 sisters, and his primary job was to keep us safe.

Anyhow, nice guy and this went well as far as knocks go! Time to go back to sleep. 

4:04am 

Okay so I think this guy woke me up in the middle of a weird sleep cycle or something because now I have the terrible nighttime sillies and I can’t stop laughing!! Zak and I were just talking about potential bad guy scenarios, and we were talking about how if we ever had to deploy our bear spray through a broken window make sure the screen was ripped first. Otherwise we’d cough ourselves out of the van! 😂 Guy in Red Truck (the other “good guy” that was allowed to stay per the security guard) just woke up and is walking around… maybe I was laughing too loud?

1:20pm 

We just -sort of brazenly- filled up our water tank at Safety Harbor Pier (Waterfront Park) in front of the bathrooms. Lots of people were giving us looks, but this lady walked by and Zak saw her gawking, so he said “I like your shoes” just as a little, “Hey, I see you’re gawking at us…” But then we got to talking and she asked where we were from. It turns out that she used to live in Niskayuna — just like me!! What a SMALL WORLD!