Store the Rig...Meet the Mechanic...Laugh in the Cash Cab

We met some beautiful people today, just when we most needed them. Here's Mehdi, who Art met while we were stowing some luggage at the Amtrak station in Fullerton, CA, Saturday morning ahead of our 6:50 pm departure. Would he pick us up from the RV storage place in two hours? He'd be delighted.

This is a tiny treasure of a train station, on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bags checked, we head off to the storage place Art had IDd from Chicago, with a Mercedes Benz shop next door. After checking out the storage site yesterday, we'd asked if we could use the Benz place air compressor to blow out the water lines in the Avion and they'd said sure. Today we meet one of the owners, the affable and capable Roger.

Art asks if there's any chance he'd be willing to start our truck every couple months to keep the batteries charged. Certainly, said he. And then as we talked we discovered he'd once had a truck just like ours, so...boys under the hood once more. Art left a list for Roger, including sourcing new rear tires.

A charming man, with a shop whose floor you could have lunched on, plus some screamin' Ford metal inside (boys under hood, redux).

  

Well, that was propitious. Happily we park the rig, sadly we say goodbye, and then it's off to meet Mehdi, who's waiting at 3 o'clock sharp just outside the gate.

I can't tell you how much fun that taxi ride was. Mehdi had a boisterous laugh and a positive outlook. Noting his ID--Mehdi Sharreshtedari--we asked where he'd been born. "Guess!" he said, laughing as he drove. "Turkey," guessed Art, and Mehdi replied "Very close, very close, my friend."

And the CashCab ride was on.

Now came the geography challenge. "If you guess close, I'll give you 90 points out of 100," Mehdi said. Could I use the ipad? "Of course," he said, laughing all the way. "Turkey is the bulls eye--I'm from a neighboring country. And if you guess correctly I'll still give you 100 points."

A quick google later, we won (there are eight countries bordering Turkey, so not bad). Mehdi hails from Iran, an elegant Persian who made our trip back to the station fly.

Big fun, big tip. Thanks, Mehdi, and thanks for making this picture. We'll call when we return.