I went with Bubba in a Chicago cab tonight, from Navy Pier to our hotel in about thirty seconds and through several red lights. The only non-speeding through city streets was when the cab driver had to merge into the left lane from a turn-only lane and had to slow down and move 1 millimeter from the bumper of some tourist that apparently didn't know this cab was intent on killing me or some pedestrian in 10 blocks.

I am not a fan of cab drivers due to this behavior. My most memorable cab rides were with Bubba in Jamaica, wondering if they even have carseat laws there because no one seemed concerned that she was in our laps with no form of restraining devices anywhere to be seen, although I am sure they had some in the storage area for ladies that wanted to get kinky on vacation. I went against the crawling nerves in my spine and the screaming in my head that yelled to me that I was doing the dumbest thing ever since liking a song by Winger, and we boarded this cab bus to town. And what a town it was. Fifteen places to buy Blue Mountain coffee, of which we bought a pound or two in 2002 and have never opened, much less placed near hot water and a filter, a few jewelry stores where the salespeople were incredibly pushy-and to be quite honest-pungent, and several filthy restaurants. The cabbies sat outside the buildings and had nothing but contempt and hatred for whoever chose one cab driver over another. I can be pushy, I can be bitchy, and I can downright be a complete psycho, but those people scared me into the sniveling little white girl that crawled in the backseat and prayed the whole way back to the cruise ship that I would never again lie on my taxes or hide my heroin injection marks if I could just arrive at the ship safely to partake in duty-free goods that I would not claim on my customs forms in the relative safety of a confined vessel with hopefully enough lifeboats and directions written in as many languages as there were spoken by the staff.

My sister-in-law and her husband never got out of the port. They had their 11-month-old KK with them, and Lips decided she wanted her hair braided in the port building while Sweetie Kris waited for her. The braiding took so long that several cabbies offered their services to take the young couple into the mountains so they could lay in the fields of marijuana and take pictures. When Sweetie Kris said he wasn't sure with the baby, one enterprising cabbie offered to take pictures of the baby in the weed also. When Sweetie Kris didn't seem to go for that immediately and pull Lips from her hair braiding, the cabbie then offered that for a low price of $30, he would take Lips and Sweetie Kris on a tour of the island, provide as much ganja as they could smoke, and they could leave KK with a lady who would watch her the whole time. Sweetie Kris passed on that offer to get completely stoned out of his gourd and then have his daughter sold into sexual slavery in some foreign country. I was pretty upset at the whole thing. He could have at least told us that the cabbies were offering weed also in addition to terrifying cab rides. That would have made it all worth it, and I would have gone back for more before leaving port.