by Kevin Burton
Ok baby bubba, let’s hear you talk your way out of this one!
Under the headline “Mislaid Mrs.,” The Sun newspaper of London ran a painfully short story about a Frenchman who drove nearly 200 miles on a vacation trip before realizing he had left his lawfully-wedded wife at a gas station.
Not his sunglasses, not his cell phone, his wife.
“A man on holiday drove almost 200 miles before remembering he had left his wife at a petrol station,” the story reads. “The 62-year-old, from Paris was driving through France en route to Morocco when he stopped to fill up.”
“But his wife got out to use the toilet without him realizing — and the hapless hubby drove off.”
“His daughter was in the car but she spent the next leg of the journey asleep and did not realize her mum was missing either.”
“The dad pulled over in a panic several hours later as he approached the Landes region, about 200 miles away from the petrol station near Orléans. He had to call the police, as he could not remember where they had stopped.”
“Leaving your phone in a gas station bathroom is one thing. Leaving your wife? That takes a special kind of road trip brain fog,” reads an account of the incident on vice.com, written by Ashley Fike.
“According to France 3, a 62-year-old man from Paris managed to do exactly that while driving to Morocco with his family. After stopping at a highway service station near Orléans around 4:30 a.m., he got back in the car and drove off, completely unaware that his wife wasn’t with him. His 22-year-old daughter was asleep in the front seat. No one noticed.”
“He finally figured it out four hours and 300 kilometers (186 miles) later. By then, he had no idea which gas station it had been.”
“‘We received this rather confusing call around 8:30 a.m.,” police from the Landes region told the outlet. “The man no longer knew where he had stopped, or when.” He guessed somewhere near Orléans. That didn’t help much.”
“Police began searching rest stops, reviewing toll booth footage, and trying to piece together a timeline. The daughter, still half-asleep, couldn’t offer much beyond ‘I didn’t notice.’ The more the man spoke, the weirder things sounded.”
“There were a lot of inconsistencies,” police said. “We saw that the girl was sitting in the front, even though that wasn’t really what they were telling us.”
“At some point, investigators started wondering if this really was a mistake—or if the man had purposely left his wife behind,” Fike wrote.
“Turns out, he hadn’t. Authorities eventually tracked her phone to a service station in Deux-Sèvres, where she’d been sitting for hours. She had already called local police to say her husband had forgotten her and hadn’t moved since 4:30 a.m.”
“The man was ordered to turn around and pick her up. After a quick investigation, police ruled out anything sinister. He really had just driven off without her.”
“The family was reunited and allowed to continue their trip to Morocco,” Fike wrote . “No word on how that car ride went, but odds are it was a little quieter than before—and probably included some questioning of their relationship. On her end.”
“It’s easy to forget your sunglasses. Forgetting your wife is next level.”
Paul Harvey, where are you when we need you? We so need…..the rest, of the story. If in fact, the story is true at all. It’s a little fantastic.
The wife had a cell phone. Why didn’t she just call either her husband’s or her daughter’s phone? Was there only one phone between them?
Did the husband not have a receipt from the gas station that would have told him where to go to collect his bride? And why is the wife in the back seat, daughter in the front?
Also, when hubby got out to pump the gas, why didn’t wifey declare, “Uh, sweet-ums, I’m going to the loo. Would you like a snack from the store?”
Anyway, so much for that French romance hype, right?
But most of all, we need to know what was said, when hubby and daughter returned to the gas station? Morocco is more than 1,600 miles from Paris by car. They still had a long way to drive together, after the incident. Were they singing along to French oldies on the car radio?
Any romantic cuddling at all, once they got to Morocco?
And my personal takeaway of course, as one who is legally blind, I would not be the one driving 200 miles if something similar happened to my wife and I on a trip. I would be the one cooling my heels at the truck stop, eating pork rinds, maybe checking on my fantasy teams, racking my brain, thinking, what did I say, what did I do?
Are these guys hiring?
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