As my car crept along a deserted road in the Virginia-North Carolina countryside, the passing scenery reminded me of the forest scene from "Deliverance." To add to the negative atmosphere, I had agreed to allow my fellow Realtor, Jill McIntyre, to partner with me on the trip and act as my navigator–more on Jill’s sterling character and background later.

     Back to the drive–the stillness on this Saturday night made me feel like a solo mortician closing up shop after the last mourner following the wake of the least popular crotchety old man in a small Southern town.

      Oh yes, the story of Jill–colleagues in our office who knew her far better than I did said she had a voice that would attack your nerves like fingernails scraping on an old-school chalkboard. Also, if you had the unfortunate luck to come out on the losing side of an argument with her, her buzz saw-like comments could leave you feeling like a worthless piece of sawdust inside of a minute.

      My unfortunate streak of luck in the office for the impending Realtor Week convention had seen me draw the short straw as part of our office’s two-person team slated to give our sales update presentation at the Wilmington, NC event.  This meant a nearly seven-hour drive from our Ocean City, MD home base.

      Of course, my own sales talent also had landed me in this position—I had worked my way up to the top of the sales production quota charts just below Wunderkind Jill.

      My office partners had warned me that a trip of any length with her could turn into a road trip from Hell, just like every business excursion they had the misfortune to experience with her in the past. No sooner had we started than we launched into a loud debate over the most effective route from downtown Ocean City heading toward Virginia. 

      Turned out I had the best idea, but we followed Miss Perfection’s route—along beach traffic-jammed Route 90--earning us a two-mile-backup in Ocean Pines, MD and stone cold silence from my co-pilot throughout the next two hours of our trip.

      We didn’t reach the three-quarter marker for our trip, Richmond, until lunchtime.

Planning for lunch resulted in another verbal skirmish, between an Italian place I knew well from my Army days near the capital and what Jill considered the only worthwhile choice for us, a local Mexican restaurant she loved because of its ambience.

      My overbearing colleague reluctantly gave in because of the location of my choice, Cici Mama, only two blocks from the exit of the interstate.

      We came out of lunch to find our SUV gone, and, in its place, we found a horse and buggy.  Hadn’t noticed any Amish wagons along the road, and their nearest settlement was 200 miles away. Not only that, but it seemed like horses and wagons of every size and shape had replaced every modern vehicle we had seen on the streets around us while we grabbed a bite to eat. Had some mysterious force thrown us into a reverse time warp back to the Old West?

 The hot Virginia sun began to beat down on us with a new ferocity. Perhaps it also had baked away what little brain power the long ride and our argument over the route had not taken away from us.

     The trip to our North Carolina conference site, which normally would take only another hour, lasted four more hours.

      After a rugged trip along a number of dusty and unpaved country roads, our GPS directed us to the area of Route 58 as darkness began to close in like the lid closing on a coffin.

         It looked like not only would we miss our own presentation, but we certainly would have to chuck the whole Realtors’ convention. 

       As my crack navigator informed me, after driving around in circles and retracing our steps again and again, the interstate finally awaited us just ahead. We finally saw signs for the entrance to the highway.

      Just as we turned onto 58 a strange green light on the road ahead blinded us.

     A creature standing about eight feet tall emerged from the light and approached our wagon. From what we could make out from the gibberish he began spouting he had come down to Earth on an exploratory mission from Mars of the future seeking a place on our planet to colonize for his people, whose area had been destroyed in an intergalactic nuclear storm.

"I have the ability," the creature said, "to tap into your minds and gather everything I need to merge into Earth as an ordinary human. Then I will transmit this information back to my home planet and my fellow Martians will come down to take over your home base, with neither you nor your leaders knowing the difference. Of course, once I complete my transformation you both will have died."

Jill and I both struggled to get out of our wagon, but we found ourselves unable to move.

      It looked like the road trip from Hell would turn into the final excursion of our lives.

I did manage to use what little brainpower I had left during the Martian transformation to replay the last few hours and try to figure a way out of this mess. 

     As I attempted to work out an escape plan with my very unhappy and extremely uncooperative colleague, we figured out that this whole scenario didn’t seem to add up. Why had the Martian picked our vehicle from all the traffic on the far reaches of this countryside, just off a major interstate highway, rather than trying to make contact with far more important government officials in Richmond, the capital of Virginia? 

    And why did he choose to stop our nondescript conveyance with two people in it rather than a family car carrying several more potential subjects for his potential takeover?

       After an hour of plotting ways to get out of what seemed like a life-ending situation, we found ourselves sitting alone in the dark, no longer prisoners in a bizarre intergalactic plot. 

      Turns out our side trip to meet the Martian had not really happened. Our friendly college-aged Gen X luncheon waitress had offered us a few sips of what she called a new, off-menu super refreshing beverage. The extra ingredient in her home brew consisted of a sprinkling of an opioid she and her college crowd had decided to test out on the first strangers to walk through the door of the restaurant. The last few hours had merely been drug-induced dreams--or should I say nightmares?

      Turns out the college kids had tried their experiment on another couple in another restaurant that morning and disappeared for a few hours, talking their way into server positions at Cici Mama hoping for a rerun of their earlier sideshow.  The couple had reported the incident to the local police, who had begun watching all Richmond eating establishments for a return of the collegiate pranksters. 

     When the police spotted the GenXers leaving the Italian place, they followed them and nabbed them watching from a rundown abandoned motel near the highway entrance while they watched us, their latest victims, trying to negotiate our way onto 58. 

        They locked the collegians up and dispatched a patrol car to pull us over.  We wound up in the local hospital’s emergency room where we took two more days to recover from our slight overdose.

      Although we missed our presentation and the home office had to fly in a second team to pitch-hit for us, we later flew to Wilmington in time for the regional award ceremony to accept Ace Achiever honors as the most productive team on the Eastern Seaboard.