Hammered Out: Hail, Hertz, and Cheese Curds

Wednesday afternoon, the kind of quiet where nothing’s happening and you start thinking maybe nothing is going to happen, I get an email:

Drop everything. Stop. Book travel immediately to Madison, Wisconsin. Stop.

Now we’re talking.

I’ve been with this company a year now. I’ve been deployed plenty—but always for regular business. One collision car at a time. Clean, controlled, predictable.

This?

This was different.

This was my first hail deployment.

Trouble starts immediately.

Flight? Got it.

Hotel? No problem.

Rental car?

Nothing.

No Enterprise. No National. No anything.

Now I’m thinking, alright, small airport, maybe slim pickings. But this felt off. So I call the travel department, and after some digging, they hit me with it:

“You’re going to have to use Hertz.”

And I’m like… alright, I guess we’re doing this.

The flight itself is routine, but the routing makes no sense.

Greensboro to Charlotte to Madison.

Now technically, I could’ve just flown out of Charlotte and skipped the nonsense—but that would require Jamie to drive me down there… and she has made it very clear she is not rearranging her entire day so I can avoid a 25-minute flight.

So instead, I fly to Charlotte.

Which is basically the aviation equivalent of driving to the end of your street, parking the car, getting out, and then starting a whole new trip to Florida.

Just… part of the process, I guess.

Things start to make less sense when I get to the gate.

There’s a  college basketball tournament in Madison this weekend , and I realize this as soon as I see multiple human beings who are, conservatively, seven feet tall, boarding the plane like it’s completely normal.

Men’s teams. Women’s teams. Different colleges.

And I end up next to a guy who physically cannot exist comfortably in a standard airline seat.

I’ve complained about legroom before.

I will never complain again.

I land in Madison and finally get the answer to the rental car mystery.

There are no cars… because they’ve all been hit by hail.

Every single one.

You can’t even make that up.

I’m here for hail damage, and the hail has already wiped out the rental fleet.

That’s not irony—that’s a welcome committee.

So yes, I end up at Hertz.

And they hand me the keys to a Red Chevy Trax.

Now listen—it’s fine. It runs. It has four wheels.  It’s covered in hail damage, But when you’ve been rolling around as a “Super Executive Elite” with National, where you can just stroll onto the lot and pick whatever catches your eye… this feels like being handed the last shopping cart with the one bad wheel.

You don’t choose the Trax.

The Trax chooses you.

Driving to the hotel, something clicks.

I start seeing it.

At first it’s subtle—little dimples catching the light wrong. Then it’s everywhere. Cars with ripples across the hood, roofs that look like someone went at them with a ball-peen hammer.

I used to play a game at the shop with new estimators—stand by a busy road and write mental estimates as cars drove by.

Hail’s harder. Pictures don’t do it justice.

But in person?

You know.

Then I pull into the hotel parking lot.

And the car next to me…

Looks like a golf ball.

Just absolutely peppered.

I sit there for a second, engine running, and just kind of nod.

“Well… that’s why I’m here.”

Inside the lobby, I’m waiting on my room, and the Weather Channel is in full panic mode.

They’re tracking this monster system from Kansas all the way up to the Canadian border.

But right over Madison?

They’ve got this deep, angry, almost purple circle.

The kind of color that doesn’t mean “maybe.”

The kind that means tomorrow night is going to be a problem.

They’re talking tornadoes.

They’re talking softball-sized hail.

And I’m thinking… perfect.

Couldn’t have timed this better.

I finish up what I need to do and, like always, I start asking the front desk where I should eat.

You don’t trust apps for that. You trust people.

One guy says he just moved here from Chicago…so he’s no use to me.

They’ve got one of those digital touchscreen things listing restaurants, which I ignore completely.

But then the woman behind the desk.. A local ,reaches under the counter and pulls out this old, beat-up binder.

Blows the dust off it like it’s evidence in a cold case.

Flips through a few pages, tears one out, and hands it to me.

“Here,” she says. “Best places around Madison.”

I look down.

And that’s when I realize—

It’s not a recommendation.

It’s a cheese curd crawl.

Multiple stops.

A full route.

Like a bar crawl, but instead of bad decisions and cheap beer, it’s deep fried dairy and Midwest pride.

And I’m thinking to myself…

How am I ever supposed to go back to eating crappy mozzarella sticks after this?

There’s levels to this game, and apparently I’ve been living a lie.

Outside, the wind’s starting to pick up.

You can feel it before you even see it—the kind of air that doesn’t sit right. The kind that makes trees whisper and parking lots go quiet.

Somewhere out there, that big purple circle on the map is getting closer, dragging everything with it.

Tornadoes.

Softball-sized hail.

The kind of night that puts body shops on the map and keeps adjusters busy for months.

The kind of night I flew here for.

And here I am…

Standing in a hotel lobby in Madison, Wisconsin, holding a hand curated roadmap to deep-fried cheese, staring down a storm that’s about to rearrange an entire zip code.

A year with this company.

Plenty of travel.

But this?

This finally feels like the job.

Tomorrow, the sky might fall.

Cars will get hammered.

Roofs will cave.

Insurance lines will light up like Christmas morning.

And me?

I’ll be out there in a Ugly Red Chevy Trax I didn’t choose, doing the math, reading the damage, and trying to stay one step ahead of whatever just came through.

But tonight?

Tonight I’ve got a mission of a different kind.

Because if the world’s about to end or at least get dented to hell

I’m not facing it on an empty stomach.

Let the storm come.

I’ve got a map full of cheese curds… and no intention of going back to mozzarella sticks ever again.