When John came inside from packing up the vehicle on Thursday in preparation for our imminent Miami departure, he had some news.
John: "There's a frog in the truck."
Me: "Wait, what?"
John: "There's a frog in the truck. He was on the door jamb, I tried to get him out, and he hopped in. So there's a frog in the truck."
Friends, I don't think I need to tell you how I reacted to this information. Let's just say that the prospect of spending five hours in the cab of a truck, wondering if and when a rogue frog was going to jump on my face wasn't terribly appealing. Realizing that I couldn't flat out refuse to get in the car ("Well I'm not going!), I took the path of least resistance and off we went. Five hours later, the frog was nowhere to be seen. I began to think that he'd escaped while John was loading up the suitcase. The rain was starting to fall as we navigated the suburbs of Miami. The streets were shiny and wet. The sky was darkening. The windshield wipers were not so much wiping the windshield as smearing them. Suddenly, John noticed a drop of rain inside the truck, near the rearview mirror. His back window already leaks, so it wasn't too surprising to hear that the windshield, too, had started to leak. I ran my hands across the seal and felt no wetness. As I withdrew my hand, I saw it: The Frog. He was sitting on the dash, looking back at me, seemingly as surprised to see me as I was to see him. It couldn't have been a more inopportune time for him to make his grand entrance. Drivers were shooting past us at 90 miles an hour, we weren't familiar with the area, and the lane markings on the wet roads were becoming increasingly harder to see.
Me: "The frog is on the dash."
John: "What?!?"
Me: "THE FROG IS ON THE DASH!"
As I reached for a piece of tupperware I'd brought along, no longer filled with scones, tension filled John's words. He may have used the phrase "so help me God," I'm not sure. In any case, it was quickly made clear to me that I was not, under any circumstances, to undertake any sort of Frog Relocation Program. The frog and I continued to stare each other down. As we neared the hotel, the frog jumped on our GPS. He sat directly over the speakers, so that (I'm sure) his little butt vibrated as a cheerful voice called out, "
Left turn ahead!" We pulled up to the hotel, and discovered that it was valet-parking only. We wouldn't be able to extract the frog as we'd hoped, because of the throngs of cabs waiting for us to get out of the way. All we could do was turn the keys over to the valet, take our belongings, and head inside.
I still don't know where that damned frog is.
