A Good Cab Driver Is Worth A Thousand Words

I am sitting at the St. Paul Amtrak station, waiting to board a train for the first time in some 20 years. This is the first leg of my 11-day trip, to Minot, ND to visit my Grandpa (Dad's dad), and then on leg two I drive my Grandma (Mom's mom) to Bismarck for her birthday bash.

Minneapolis to Minot, by train.
Minot to Bismarck, by car.
Bismarck to Minot, by car.
Minot to L.A., by plane.
L.A. to Minneapolis, by plane.

After work today I took care of a number of loose ends, then killed a few hours before having to head to the train station.  I opted to take a cab from work so my car will be there waiting when I get off the light rail from the airport, which drops me about 5 blocks from work, on the last leg of the trip.

Enter Karl, the cab driver, who's charge it was to get me to the station on time.

I struck up a convo with him by saying I was getting on a train for the first time in some 20 years.  Karl is probably about 50 or so, grey, olive skinned, with a mildly thick, indistinctive accent, and speaks pretty fluent English. 

He siezed the conversational opportunity and jumped right in with a great story about the last time he was on a train, from Madrid to Lisbon when he was "much younger" than I am.  He hooked me right away by saying he almost got married as a result of that train ride.

Reader's Digest version, he'd recently escaped his country, and was walking down the street in Madrid at 4 in the morning after a night out drinking with a friend, who'd taken it upon himself to teach Karl how to whistle.  After a number of blocks of this they tired of the whistling, and soon after came upon a girl who'd began questioning them in a spanish (which neither of them spoke very well) about why he'd given up so easily.  It took some back and forth, but he soon realized she'd been walking a block ahead of them for quite some time thinking they were whistling at her.

Long story short, after spending the rest of the night and into the morning talking with her, she told him she was getting on a train later that morning to Lisbon.  They said their goodbyes, but Karl, thinking he might be letting the love of his life slip away, grabbed a bouquet of flowers, and bought a ticket on the very same train to be with her.

In Lisbon, they spent 7 happy months dating, until things got a little complicated, and Karl decided to run.  He said, "To this day, I still don't know if I did the right thing or the wrong thing leaving."

"But," he said, "Portugese women get so fat after they marry, that I'm more certain that I did the right thing than not."

See, now THAT is why you leave a cab driver an $8 tip on a $22 fare.