Chapter Thirty-Two
A Major Mishap—Finally!
May 22, 2009—Kansas City to Sergeant Bluff: Before I get to our major mishap, here's an interesting statistic about the first half of the trip. When I Googlemapped the distance from home to St. Louis, the answer I got was 2,194 miles. That was the straight route. Our actual driving distance to St. Louis was 3,331 miles. OK, perhaps it isn’t so interesting, but it shows how much sightseeing we did.
Now to the mishap. I received an automated email alert from our credit card company saying that there was some unusual activity going on. Indeed, it turned out that someone had gotten our credit card number and was testing it to see if it was valid. So, we had to cancel the card and get a new one. Normally this involves a new card being sent out and arriving in a week or so, but that wouldn't work so well on our trip.
According to Wikipedia, 0.1% of all credit card transactions are fraudulent. This number has stayed relatively constant or even decreased over the years due to improved fraud detection systems.
Thieves have many schemes for getting your number, ranging from bluetooth skimmers which, installed on top of a legitimate readers, grab information and send it to a nearby laptop, to waitresses simply writing down the data from the card.
The credit card companies seem to just accept this as a cost of doing business. The cardholder isn’t liable for fraudulent charges, but as we found, if it happens at the wrong place and time, it can be a major inconvenience. A real first-world problem.
In the past, I’ve used Mastercard’s ShopSafe program. That is, I generated many virtual numbers, and used a different one for each merchant. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, however, since the virtual numbers only lasted for a year, and if your main number was stolen, all of those virtual numbers were also (unnecessarily) invalidated. In any case, since the cardholder is not liable for fraud, the ShopSafe program is useful only to the card issuer.
Perhaps this wasn't a major mishap, just a medium mishap. However, I've found that without a credit card, one feels like a second-class citizen. You can't reserve a hotel room or campsite, gasoline purchases aren't as quick and easy, and you have to carry more cash. The mishap was putting a crimp in the free-wheeling nature of our trip. So, I wanted to get the new cards ASAP. The problem was discovered on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, adding to the complication. But with some time spent on the cell phone at a rest area, I arranged for overnight Fedexing (with Saturday delivery) of the new cards. That's why, as I write this, I'm sitting in the lobby of an Econolodge in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa.
Our Econolodge looked a little like a prison, with a rows of doors and windows set into a brick wall. It was indeed our prison until our credit card owner status was restored. But the hotel wasn't bad at all. Small, but clean and comfortable. The rooms smelled slightly of cigarette and fertilizer, but the advantages of being 20 feet from your car outweighed the lack of cushiness.
We once stayed in an awesome Mom and Pop motel in Tonopah, Nevada: The Clown Motel. I asked the owner how to tell, when driving by, whether a motel is good or not. His advice: inspect the outside of the building. If it’s neat and well-maintained, you can expect the same for the rooms.
We had planned to go a lot further on this first day of our return trip, but it was better to get the card shipment all set up before late afternoon. We took advantage of our change in plans by saddling up and going on a bike ride in this super-flat region.
We headed out on the straightest, flattest road I've ever seen. There wasn't much change in scenery and no turning or climbing, so it felt more like riding a stationary bike than a real bike. However, the weather was great—it had that nice “thunderstorm coming” vibe.
We've found that roads are not very bike-friendly here in the Midwest, as you can tell from the two inch shoulder in the above photograph. This was true in St. Louis and Kansas City as well. I had gone on a short ride from Jenny's apartment in KC, but had to just tool around the residential neighborhoods, since the bigger roads would have been suicide.
Our Iowa route had a concrete road with no paved shoulder. All but one of the cars gave us plenty of space; they were driving around 60 MPH.
We headed into Bronson, Iowa, a community with perhaps 80 residents, all of whom had credit cards. The ride was 23 miles altogether, and we felt that we had burned off those BBQ calories we'd accumulated.
Did the new credit cards arrive to make us whole again? Find out soon, but first, a word from our sponsor: Pepsi!