The Night the Car Started Making Strange Smells and Ended up in a Ditch

The concept was simple enough.
I had a free room at Winstar Casino, about a two hour drive down I-35 from my house. The plan was to meet my friend Brian Ray (aka Lil Kat, B-Ray) at Riverwind Casino at 2 p.m. We'd make the drive, play poker for two days, and drive back. Easy enough.
At 2:10 I receive a text message from B-Ray. "Just woke up from nap. Will be late."
Really? The single guy with zero responsibilities needed a nap to freshen up for an evening of sitting on his butt playing cards? That's cool, I was hoping to sit in the Riverwind parking lot for an hour.
At about 2:50 I get another text. "I'm here." I text back, "I'm in the east parking lot, next to the hotel. Third row." He responds, "I'm out front."
At this point I'm just ready to go so I grab my bag, lock my car and start walking to the front. The casino faces Highway 9, which is right by I-35, so it would be convenient for him to be there so we could just hop on the road. But I get there and he's not there, so I call and ask where he is. "I told you I'm out front." I say, "I'm out front and you aren't here." He then clarifies that he is outside the poker room, which is at the back of the casino. So when he said he was "out front" he really meant that he was "out back." He also informed me that he couldn't find my car because he didn't know which direction east was. This is what an engineering degree from OU gets you these days.
I had asked him to drive because my car, an old Honda Accord, had its check engine light on a few days prior. It was driving fine and the light hadn't been on (in fact I had canceled an appointment to the car shop), but I didn't want to get stranded two hours from home. This would prove to be quite ironic.
About 10 miles down the road, Lil Kat's temperature warning lit up. The gauge was past the H and the car was obviously overheating.
At this point Brian thought it was a good time to let me know this his car had been also been acting funny of late. He told a tale of a drive-though encounter at Taco Bell, whereupon the cashier notified him that he was leaking a huge amount of anti-freeze. He figured the guy was an idiot since he worked at Taco Bell so the warning was ignored. Good thinking, let's just let the car blow up in Thackerville, Oklahoma.
We did, however, make it down to Winstar, where I lost the biggest pot I played. To Lil Kat. Good times.
The next day went better for me and I ended up having a profitable trip (alas, Lil Kat cannot say the same). At about 11 p.m., we decided to head back home.
Less than 10 miles into the 110-mile return trip, however, the temperature gauge lit up again. Not a surprising result since nothing had been done to fix it. But this time several other warnings lit up. Actually, just about every warning function on his piece of crap 2007-ish Chevy Malibu.
First, allow me to describe the current driving conditions. It was about 30 degrees outside with a rather dense fog. And we are the only car on I-35.
The check engine light came on. Then a warning that said, "Oil is at zero percent." Then something that said, "Energy saver mode activated." Brian couldn't get the car to go more than 50 mph and the heater wasn't working. More alarmingly, the car was making an awful clanking sound and smelled like burnt sausage.
Lil Kat asked what the chances of us making it home were. I estimated 40 percent.
Somehow, we plodded for over two hours at 50 mph but made it to the Highway 9 exit where Riverwind is located. We would have made it to the casino but, to quote our friend Tim Widowski, "Lil Kat is the worst driver I know."
First, he almost missed the exit. More amazing than that, he chose the wrong direction to turn after exiting the highway.
Riverwind Casino, where B-Ray spends roughly 70 hours per week, is a huge, bright building just West of I-35. The Highway 9 exit puts you on the east side of I-35. To get to the casino you have to cross over the highway. Or you can drive the opposite direction of the casino.
So after making a last-second swerve to exit the highway, Lil Kat then veers right at the fork in the road, taking us away from the casino and straight toward absolutely nothing.
I point out that we should be going the other way. To be fair to B-Ray, it was quite foggy and you couldn't see much. It did appear as if there was nothing but pavement in front of us, and there wasn't a clear designated area to turn around.
So B-Ray gets the car in position to turn around and then -- thump! splash! -- we drive over a small ledge into a puddle of mud. His back tires weren't totally off the ground, but we were stuck pretty good. After Googling "car in a ditch" I chose the image above to most closely correlate to the crappyness of B-Ray's car and the ditch we were stuck in.
When it became obvious that we weren't going to get out of the ditch, Brian called AAA. While he was on the phone, a McClain County Sheriff's car came by. The cop was really nice, asked if we needed any help, and even remarked about how easily someone could drive into the ditch because of the fog. When I told him we were calling AAA, he said he was going to leave but that we should call 911 if we need anything else.
AAA said the tow would be there in an hour, and Brian had to wait for them to get there. I decided to walk the quarter mile over the highway to Riverwind and head home. But as I was leaving, another McClain County Sheriff's car pulled up. This cop was not as cool.
"How in the hell did you get in there???" he yelled after jumping out of his car. He made it sound like we had damaged his personal property or that he would in some way be helping us out of the situation.
Brian explained the wrong turn and the fog, but this guy wasn't interested.
"All I care about is whether you guys have been drinking," he said. "Have you been drinking?"
"No," Brian said. "Not one drop actually."
"Okay, well I still don't see how you ended up in that thing but all I really care about is whether you've been drinking."
As he walked back to his car, I tried to seize upon the opportunity for a free ride back to my car.
"Any way I can get a lift back to Riverwind?" I asked.
"I'm not going that way," he said, driving off.
As I walked across the highway in 30 degree fog, I thought about how much money my family could get from McClain County if I got ran over because this jerk wouldn't go one minute out of his way to drop me off at Riverwind.
It all just goes to show you that Brian Ray is a terrible driver.

P.S. The tow truck Brian called drove into the same ditch, which is pretty funny. But it got out and got B-Ray's car back to his place. He took it to a shop, where it got some much-needed anti-freeze. According to Lil Kat, that was all that was wrong with the car. But coming from someone who knows less about cars than a Taco Bell cashier, I don't think I'll be rolling the dice in that thing for quite some time.