EMontWrites

We got there on a wing and a prayer let me tell you!

I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina a town 6 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing more scarce here than men is a good one, here’s how it went down!

So it’s almost midnight and we’re talking on the phone, you know…

He’s trying to figure out where we should go when we hang out the next day. He’s throwing out names of restaurants I’ve never heard of, an idea about catching the ferry to go to this sandwich shop, cute stuff right!

Then he has this bright idea…

“Let’s go to Popeyes”

I know what you’re thinking, ‘Did he really say Popeyes?’ he did. And I said yes.

There’s a Bojangles on every corner in Wilmington but not a single Popeye’s. There is one however, 45 minutes away.

He has it all planned out. He’s going to pick me up at noon and drive us to Popeyes. Sounds easy right?

****

It’s 11:30 a.m. the next day and I’m in the kitchen pre-gaming mixing Bacardi with lemonade. It’s happy hour somewhere and I’m about to ride into the country with this guy. If the thought of fried chicken didn’t calm my first date nerves, the rum did.

He pulls up, hops out, I hop in and we take off on our road trip. It’s not long before the Bacardi hits my system and Cardi B blasts out of his, so I’m basically lit.

It’s a good 40 minutes of highway, a lot of talking and ‘deer crossing’ signs. I mean we talked about a lot. You can cover the past, present and future in 40 minutes, and did!

We get almost there, you can smell the chicken in the air when his car stops moving. We’re stuck in the middle of a busy intersection and when he pushes the gas, the car doesn’t accelerate.

I don’t know if this is some subconscious man thing to know what to do next but he immediately hops out the car and starts pushing it across the street and around the corner. I thought about hopping out to help but my eyes were glued to his arms pushing the car, I was mesmerized y’all.

There we are, in the country, a half a mile from our destination stuck in the parking lot of a motel. If this isn’t the perfect setup for a horror film…

We get on the phone to call around for the car part he needs and a woman with her two boys yells across the parking lot asking if we need a ride.

I tell him to go ahead and I’ll stay with the car. I sit in the car half tipsy pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming when someone bangs on the window.

“You need some water?”

A woman from the motel hands me a bottle of water and tells me she “knows how this goes” and offers up her husband to help us if need be.

Mr. Man returns, car part in hand, a permanent smile on his face and a “thank you for lunch” from the little boys.

Y’all.

I’m too done at this point. He drives us out here, pushes his own car, buys random kids lunch, changes out the broken part in his car. I’m seriously looking around for a kryptonite blade to use for protection.

He didn’t get the car to operate well enough to get us back home so he called his friends to come get us.

We weren’t about to let that stop us from getting to Popeyes though! We walked the half mile there and devoured that chicken WITH extra red beans and rice.

His friends came and they roasted each other the whole 45 minute trip back to Wilmington. I literally got a headache from laughing so much all day.

Get well to his vehicle, car problems are the worst, but that whole day was as if nothing bad had happened.

Now for the lesson.

I’ve seen a lot of women prose the questions, would you date a guy who took you to *insert something with a value menu*? And I’ve seen the meme that says “Applebee’s is not a date” here’s what I think…

Ladies, the only thing you should be worried about is if he’s taking you somewhere you want to go. If you don’t want McDonald’s, tell him you’d rather go to Burger King.

Don’t shut down the opportunity to get to know a decent person because he suggested Outback over Fogo De Chao or China Café over Ru Sans (China Café tastes better anyway).

A first date is literally supposed to be an in person amount of time to get to know someone, while doing something you both like to do. Let him impress you with who he is and how he treats you.

I’m sure if I would have picked the ferry ride that’s what we would have done, it would have looked good on Instagram too, but I picked Popeye’s and it turned out to be a day I’ll never forget.

And as for Popeyes guy…