In my defense, I got five hours of sleep Friday night—thanks a lot, Out of Bounds, with your awesome parties.

I was up bright and early Saturday morning, packing every damn thing I need for this trip, organizing all the way down to which pocket of the backpack I was putting things in (right, left, rear, top). Made a last-minute visit to Target for some remaining checklist items—camera tripod, Altoids, needle and thread. Met a friend for some goodbye pizza. Picked up some borrowed camera gizmos from Matt. And then watched UT win its season opener in typically-sloppy fashion with some good friends. (Well, they were watching; I was packaging oatmeal and couscous and dried blueberries into individually-sized Ziplocs.)

Finally as the hour grew late, things began coming together. I weighed my entire pack and it wasn’t too far over my target weight. I asked my friends’ collective help in carting everything off the dining table and into the car—maps, toilet paper, Hardy Boys mysteries. I got the clothes I needed for Sunday out of the bag. It was time for bed. I shut the trunk lid.

…I had locked my keys in the trunk.

Really.

I had that moment of genuine intellectual confusion—wait, people don’t REALLY lock their keys in their own trunks, do they?—and then realized that against all the laws of physics and reason, yes, I’d done exactly that. There was no spare key, but there was a passel of sympathetic friends, including my buddy Dave, visiting from Tennessee. Hey guess what? In the Special Forces, Dave learned how to break into cars!

So using some improvised tools from Brent and Amalia’s garage, after 40 minutes of effort, we jimmied our way into the Neon, and I wriggled through the trunk and grabbed my keys. Crisis over.

So that put me in bed an hour ahead of time, and got me pondering whether this was the official glitch for the trip, or the first of many. Guess I was about to find out.

As I finally drifted off to sleep at 1 AM, I had one final horrific realization:

My car doesn’t have cruise control.