Saturday, July 12, 2008

No Drive-Thru? No Problem

After barbecuing dinner (delicious buffalo burgers for me, cow carcass for the rest of my unadverturous family), we went down to Dos Lagos a few miles across town to walk around the lakes and look at the shops.

We were in Gymboree looking for a pair of kahki pants that Natalie could wear her school shirt with when suddenly I heard this big crash, like someone dropped a tray of plates...and then the tray, and then all of the other trays. I stepped outside (because I was right by the door) in time to hear a random guy walking by the front of the store exclaim an explicative at what he was looking at.

I followed his eyes to find the back end of a Mercedes sticking out of the front of a store, definately not something you see every day. As a matter of fact, it was quite a surreal site. The yellow lights of the security truck were flashing, soon joined by a police car. People began to gather around, some ran to get a closer look or maybe to offer some help.

Kara paid for the shorts and we made our way down to the ever growing crowd surrounding the car and the shop. The Mercedes, one of those expensive SUVs, had plowed its way up the curb, across a 15-foot sidewalk, through the front windows of the shop, knocking over one of the main support pillars, bending in all of the metal frames of the windows above the front doors and smashing out most all of the glass. The kicker was that the store, Z Galleries--one of those places to buy high-end knick-knacks you realized you don't need by the time you bring it home--is probably the most expensive shop in all of Dos Lagos. And Mercedes don't grow on the cheap trees either.

On the bench outside the shop was a family of four, trembling and consoling each other, probably half happy they weren't hurt and probably embarrassed to be attracting so much attention. It could have been infinately worse, given how crowded Dos Lagos was tonight (there are Jazz bands playing there this summer), and it only would have taken one person not paying attention and not expecting to get plowed down by an SUV while in the store to make this story into a tragic one. Instead, it is somewhat humorous.

How the woman who was driving managed to get the Mercedes so far into the store is amazing, but the store's facade looked as though it would come down at any moment. The police started to baracade off the area, and there were plenty of people taking pictures.

Wouldn't you know it: The one day I forget my camera, something unusual happens. Instead, the picture at the top is just a random one to give an idea of what Dos Lagos' sidewalks looks like.

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