“What were you wearing?”

In hindsight, those words my mother uttered both infuriate and amuse me. But let’s rewind 24 hours to put them into context.

My sister Charlene, my friend Greg, and I stood before my apartment assessing my car.

“Oooh, I don’t know, Kim,” Greg drawled in his Northern Maine accent. “I down’t think yah cah was made to carry that much. You’ll be lucky if yah make it oot of the dawh-yahd.” (Dooryard is a colloquial term for driveway.)

He might be right I worried. I’d packed my little Honda Civic to the point of overflow. I filled every inch of the interior with belongings gathered during my three-year stint there and even attached a temporary set of luggage racks to carry more.

Gravity forced my car’s axles low to the ground and left little room inside to ride. Had I strapped a rocking chair up top, the Clampett’s Granny would have fired a shotgun salute.

“Oh well,” I shrugged. “I guess we’ll see how it goes on the road.”

Crack of dawn, Charlene and I set out for our 1,600-mile trek to Florida with two goals in mind:

1. Enjoy a lunch in southern Maine. She loved Murder She Wrote and wanted to see a Cabot-Cove-style town.
2. Stay overnight in New York. We planned to visit the Statue of Liberty.

Goal #1 was easy. Our stomachs growled as we drove into York, Maine. We pulled over, dipped our toes in the Atlantic and enjoyed yummy lobster rolls.

On to Goal #2. Twelve hours into our journey, we merged onto the Bronx Parkway. We needed a hotel, but this was 2004. We weren’t equipped with smartphones. We had a AAA map.

I urged Charlene to stop at the next gas station, jumped out and approached the attendant slumped behind a bullet-proof window.

“Hi there. Can you tell me where I might find a nearby hotel?” I asked with a smile.

“Nope.”

“No? Really?”

“Nope. Next…”

I stood flummoxed as the next person in line elbowed me aside. Hrmph! This must be that dreaded New Yorker rudeness. As I made my way back to the car, I noticed a man walking by.

“Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me where we might find a hotel nearby?”

“Well, there’s one right across the bridge.” He paused…looked me and my car up and down. “Scratch that. Drive that way. About a mile on the right. You’ll be more comfortable there.”

Now that’s the kind of helpfulness we needed.

“Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day!”

The hotel he directed us to wasn’t a brand name. Family owned, I thought.

“Oh look. It’s got covered parking spaces. Perfect for our Beverly Hillbilly’s car!” I laughed.

We entered the lobby and found the desk clerk chatting on the phone. My eyes wandered to my left while we waited for him to finish.

“Oh my, Charley, this vending machine has condoms and sex toys in it.”

She mumbled something incoherent.

My eyes moved forward to the sign over the front desk.

1 hour: $25

2 hours: $40

All night: $80

Charlene’s words crystallized.

“We gotta get out of here,” she repeated, this time locking onto my arm.

Dragging me outside, I begged to go back and take some photos. She threw the car into gear in response.

Thirty minutes later we laughingly settled into our non-hooker hotel and called mom. After explaining the almost sexual escapade that “seemingly nice” man sent us on, my mother questioned: “What were you wearing?”

What do you think? Clothes or car? Hooker or hillbilly? Was I asking for it?