Story: In Construction

At my brother's wedding recently I was hanging out with some great high school friends of mine.  As it tends to happen stories of days gone by were told.  And we told a lot.  One that my good friend Ryan Charest and I laughed at was about a last minute decision to attend a concert.

[The following story is in no way an endorsement for poor decision making.  If you learn from this you're an idiot and I'm surprised you were able to learn from this.]

Ryan and I had just gotten off a 8 hour shift at the McDonald's we worked at, and because we were always hanging out, we started driving around trying to figure out what kind of trouble we could get into.  Because the crowd of ladies at the local ice cream place didn't seem to capture our attention we decided to attend a concert.
My youth pastor, Bob Cole, had this musician he really liked.  At least he played this Christian artist's music video once a year during a Wednesday night youth group meeting.  But for the life of me I can't remember the artist name.  Neither could Ryan.
The only problem was the concert started in half an hour and Ryan and I needed to swing by my place and find something other than our McDonald's uniform to wear.  Now that I think about it, we actually thought we could successfully hit on girls in our McDonald's gear.  Which only tells you just how cool we were.  Or weren't.
After a quick stop at my house and a quicker change of clothes, we contacted our friend (and youth pastor's son) Brian Cole, and convinced him to join us.  Then like Bo and Luke we skidded across the hood of my 4-cylinder Isuzu I-Mark and headed out.
However, despite our quick stop, our problem only had gotten bigger.  Or shorter.  I don't know.  The concert was in Spearfish, and we were in Rapid City, which according to Google Maps is 48.1 miles away, or 51 minutes.  And we only had 30 minutes to make it in time.  Plus we needed to stop off in Black Hawk (which was along the way) and pick up Brian.
But it wasn't like we were in a hurry.  We didn't really even care about the music, per se.  We were just bored and being late was better than doing nothing.  So as we travel in our nonchalant manner, we were listening to music and singing and laughing and telling stories and just being teenagers.
That is until I looked down and noticed my speedometer.  We were rolling down the road at 115 mph.  I said, "hey guys, we're look how fast we're going."   We marveled at this for about 10 seconds.  Then I noticed something else.  "Hey guys.  We're going 115 in construction."  Yep that's right.  I was driving 115 mph in construction.  I kept going for another minute, because I wanted to continue to look like I intended to be traveling that fast. But then I quickly slowed down to a more respectable speed of, like, 85 mph.
When we arrived at the concert location we learned that we were an hour early.  I swore to myself that I would never speed like that ever again.  That was until a few months later.  But I promise I've only driven that fast twice.
Again I can't remember who the musician was, but Ryan and I did remember that his guitarist name was George.  We could remember because we spent the evening singing between songs, "George. George. George of the jungle.  Friend to you and me.  Watch out for that tree!"  [Remember that? I put the youtube clip at the end to remind you, just in case.]
I don't attempt to explain our behavior, except to say that we were problem strung out on Mellow Yellow and candy cigarettes.
Later we traveled home at a reasonable speed.  As we passed other vehicles we would turn on the dome light in my Isuzu I-Mark and start pumping our arms like we were running past them.  Then while passing what seemed like the 15th vehicle I notice flashing red and blue lights in my rear view mirror.
I started to panic.  I speed up to pull in front of the car we were passing and began to slow down on the shoulder.  "I don't think I speeding.  Is pretending to run past other vehicles with the dome light on illegal?"  None of us knew.
But the state trooper didn't pull me over.  In fact he just sped past me at a ridiculous and unsafe speed.
Now I was scared to death, or at least scared to get a ticket.  I continued on at a slower than speed limit pace.  Then all the cars we had just passed began passing us.  Finally the last car passed us and as it did a middle aged woman flipped on her dome light, pretended to be running past us, stopped, then pointed and laughed at us.  She was awesome!
That's all the story we tell, but I'm sure we ended up crashing in one of our basements and watching Billy Madison.