No Dragons Press Episode 17: “The Mysterious Nathan Trowbridge”

Show Notes

These are the show notes from No Dragons Press: Episode Seventeen: The Mysterious Nathan Trowbridge. (I start reading the chapter somewhere around 5 or 6 minutes in.)
Hey guys, hope you had a great weekend!

I had a really interesting weekend, kind of a ridiculous story to report.

So, I was in Wisconsin for this wasn’t really a festival, sort of a one-day concert with two stages and different bands and you walked back and forth as you wanted to.

OK, let me set the stage for you: there are three main locations for this story: the park, where the event happened, and about a half a mile away toward the downtown area, the hotel and the local bar we always go to that has live music.

More on that later.

So we’re in the park, enjoying the festival and the music, drinking beer, hanging out, say hi to some of the bands, and head off toward the bar. And at some point in the night, I realize…I don’t have my phone.

To backtrack a little bit, it wasn’t exactly a Halloween party–it was sort of a pub crawl thing. Long story short, my costume ended up involving a lunch cooler—you know, those things where the entire side zips off and folds back—so I had that because it was part of my costume. (I love costumes!)

So we’re at the bar, I realize holy shit, I don’t have my phone. I was not super excited about losing it, so I walk all the way back down to the park from the bar, they’re shutting down, we’re talking to the cleanup crew, nothing in the green room, nothing where my car was—nothing. There’s nothing.

Eventually, I head back to the bar for a while, and then just go back to the hotel and go to sleep.

Meanwhile, our friend who’s staying in the room with us is just gone—he’s just somewhere. I have no idea.

So I’m sleeping like shit—you know, when you’re anxious—and I’m just laying there thinking, where’s my phone, where’s my phone.

I’m not really this absentminded! I don’t lose my phone—I’m not a person to just take things out of my bag and leave them places. And all I keep thinking is, there was this guy who—when we were backtracking, somebody had suggested going online and doing this tracking thing with the computer. And I thought, yeah, when I get back to Minneapolis and I’m near a computer…yeah, great advice, thanks. And I’m just assuming he’s talking about one of those tracking programsyou had to pre-install.

So I’m laying there and—side note, eventually my buddy does come back, just completely zombied out with makeup, metallic…I don’t even know. They afterbar’d, went to breakfast, and they were coming back at like 7:30. So he comes back in, I let him into the hotel room, I’m just trying to figure this out.

I’m thinking, OK, it’s possible that it’s somewhere in the hotel. So I go to the desk, nothing there, I check in my car again, nothing—in the bright light of day, it is nowhere to be found.

Then I see these computers sitting in the hotel lobby. And I just keep thinking of this guy who told me about this tracking your Android thing.

To back up a little bit, my phone’s been having battery issues so I’ve been keeping it on airplane mode a lot. I’m really only taking it off of airplane mode if I want to you know, upload a picture or something, and then I’m putting it right back on airplane mode. But sometimes I forget.

They’ve got free coffee in the lobby, and everyone is sleeping, and I just feel terrible. So, totally not expecting it to work, I Google “how to find my lost Android phone” and fucking sure enough—basically in about three clicks, I’ve got a map, in this hotel lobby, of the park the festival was in, with a little pinpoint directly in the center of the park. That’s my phone.

I’m just looking at this like—oh my god, my phone! We were walking around on top of it.

So I go upstairs to get it and I wake up my husband to tell him I’m heading out, and he’s really excited, because he’d been helping me find it the night before, so he springs out of bed and we jump in the car and we go down to the park.

I had taken a photograph of the Google map in the hotel lobby with my husband’s phone, so we get down to the festival, it’s like 8:00. They’re just starting to clean up, the stages are town down, there’s a guy doing the garbage thing.  So I look around, and my husband’s looking around, and the guy kind of smiles at us, and I ask him if he’s seen a phone.

So he’s explaining to me, no, I haven’t seen a phone, what kind of phone do you have, and I see husband just pointing to the ground like five feet from us. “Is that it?”

So I look, and there it is: soaking wet with dew, facedown—wouldn’t have seen it even if he had been able to call me the night before, which by the way his phone had died—thirteen missed calls from the Great Phone Search, and right in the guy’s path where he would have come right across it about twenty seconds later if we hadn’t rolled up and walked right toward it.

So, against literally odds, I got my really expensive phone back! And I’m still just kind of in chock right now that that happened.

The beer was good, some of the bands were good. Other than that, saw some friends, heard some music—yeah, can’t complain.

I guess the moral of this story is, if you have a Halloween costume, make sure to build in a really good place for your valuables, because it turns out a lunch cooler is not an excellent purse. Lesson learned.

Go zombies.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Chapter 17, “The Mysterious Nathan Trowbridge.”

(If you need me, I’ll just be here with my phone, hugging it to my chest and never letting it go.)

Enjoy!

Thanks for listening, you guys!

OK, I know there’s been a lot of wandering around in the woods and stuff—that’s the thing with reading one chapter a week, is that things don’t always happen super quickly.

You’re going to want to check in next week, because shit is definitely going to start to happen, some momentum is going to pick up, and I’m really excited that we’re approaching this point in the story and really excited you’re here with me! I hope you tune in next week, and thanks again.

Hey, and if you like what you’ve been hearing, make sure to tell a friend! It’s the best way to help me reach people who might appreciate what I’m doing. Tanks so much for your support and see you next week—can’t wait!

Take care.

(And be sure to check out ascraeuspress.com/nodragons to learn more about our Weekly Illustrated Fiction series!)

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