It’s 2:50 a.m. This Seemed Reasonable.

My phone rang at 2:50 a.m.

Not buzzed. Not vibrating politely on the nightstand. Rang. Loud enough to snap me out of sleep and straight into that split second where your brain runs through every possible catastrophe before you even sit up.

Hospital. Fire. Jail. Or worse, the gendarmes.

I answered it with a sound that wasn’t a word.

“Oi mate,” the voice said. Cheerful. Alert. Entirely unconcerned with the hour. “I’m out front.”

Out front of what, exactly, was not immediately clear.

Then it hit me. Mike.

The Englishman. The solution. The problem. The guy I’d hired off a website that looked like it hadn’t been updated since George W. Bush’s first term. The man who, according to his messages earlier that day, was somewhere between England and Burgundy with a van, a trailer, and my fate.

I swung my legs out of bed and shuffled toward the stairs, still holding the phone away from my face like it might explode.

“You’re… here?” I asked.

“Yep. Pulled up a minute ago. No rush.”

No rush. At 2:50 in the morning. In rural Burgundy. I hung up and headed outside.

The yard was dark except for a single headlamp cutting through it like a lighthouse beam. Parked at the edge of the drive was a white van pulling a narrow box trailer that looked less like a car hauler and more like something you’d rent to move a riding mower.

And standing beside it was Mike. White athletic socks pulled halfway up his calves. Pale knees glowing faintly in the dark. Wearing a t-shirt that had seen better decades and loose athletic shorts. For a brief moment, my still-fogged brain wondered if he was wearing 1970s coach’s shorts. He looked rested. Energized. Like a man who had just finished a good nap and was excited to get on with his day.

“You ready?” he asked. That’s when I noticed something important. There was no tow truck.

This was not the beginning of the problem.

At this point, the Beast (the car that never should have come over) had been dead for days.

Not moody-dead. Not intermittently sulking. Properly dead. Wouldn’t start. Wouldn’t click. Wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. It sat in the driveway of our Burgundy rental like a very expensive lawn ornament, daring me to figure out what to do next.

The local garage couldn’t fix it. The Mercedes dealership in Dijon couldn’t look at it until August. August in France is not a month. It’s when everyone disappears.

A fellow expat friend in Carcassonne had miraculously secured an appointment for us at a dealership in her town. Carcassonne was 600 kilometers away. Someone on my side? It was worth it.

Which left one question. How on Earth do you move a dead SUV from Burgundy to the South of France?

Enter Clicktrans. A shipping marketplace that connects you with independent transporters across Europe. Think eBay, but instead of bidding on vintage lamps, you’re bidding on strangers to move your problems.

Mike’s bid came in at £795. He was driving from England down toward Carcassonne the next day. He said he could pick it up on the way. Note exactly a straight line, but I don’t understand the world of European transportation.  Mike spoke in pounds. France thought in euros. My brain heard dollars. Somewhere in there, I stopped converting and started agreeing. I said yes. At the time, this felt like progress.

Was this legit? I had no idea. The site looked like it had been built in 2008 and hadn’t been touched since. But I had to do something. Between the two rental cars and the dead Mercedes, I was bleeding euros like a punctured wine bladder. So I booked him.

The next day, nothing. Radio silence. That is until around five in the afternoon, when Mike messaged to say he’d be there in a couple of hours to pick up the car.

Okay. Not ideal. But I’ll take it. A couple of hours turned into three. Then four.

Meanwhile, my friends were on glass number eleven, well past casual enjoyment and deep into the part of the evening where time stops mattering. I was pretending to be present while quietly running through everything that could go wrong and checking my WhatsApp every sixty seconds.

By midnight, we were still alert, still talking, and increasingly confident that whatever happened next would be handled competently by a future version of ourselves.

Then Mike called.

“Oy mate, I'm on the road but gettin’ tired. Might pull over and kip a bit. I’ll let you know in the mornin’ what time I’ll be there.”

That was fine. I went to bed.

Apparently, Mike’s definition of “the morning” began at 2:50 a.m.

“Let’s pull the Merc up the ramp,” he said, casually pulling two narrow metal rails from the trailer like this was a routine Tuesday. “Drive it up nice and slow.”

“Drive it?” I asked. “Mike, the car doesn’t even start.” He looked at me for a moment, processing this information like it was mildly inconvenient but not disqualifying.

“Well then, we’ll push it, won’t we?” Push it. A 2.5-ton German panic machine. At three in the morning. Push it. It was parked on gravel. It was the middle of the night. And the ramps he was holding were about a foot wide each.

Oh no, I just can’t… I told Mike “I’ll be right back”.

I did what any self-respecting man would do in that moment: I went inside and woke up my friend Eric. Eric, mind you, is an aeronautical engineer. Designed helicopters for the US Army. Calm. Precise. Not a man who appreciates late-night improvisation involving massive vehicles and gravity.

I rousted him from his wine-soaked slumber. Thankfully, he got up.  I gave him a ten-second briefing. “Guy from England. Dead Mercedes. Trailer. Ramps. Three a.m.”

He blinked. Paused. Then said, “Okay.” Which is how I knew I hadn’t explained it well enough.

We walked outside together. Eric took in the scene — the van, the ramps, Mike in his socks — and looked at me as if to say “Is this is real?”

I told him he was going to have to help me push it up those ramps somehow. He just stared at me. He is a good man. I told him I would put it in neutral and see what happens.

I opened the driver’s door and reached under the push-start button and pulled it off to insert the emergency key. If I could get the car into neutral, we could roll it.

As I fumbled around the button, pressing where I’d pressed a dozen times before, something happened. The dashboard lit up. The engine turned. The car started. Just… started.

For a full week, the Beast had done nothing but lie dormant. It hadn’t responded to cables, coaxing, threats, or optimism. But now, at 3 a.m., with a stranger in socks waiting patiently, it roared back to life like it had simply been waiting for an audience.

No warning lights. No hesitation. Perfect idle. I stared at the dash. Then I stared at Eric who had the same WTF look on his face.

Mike nodded, as if this confirmed something he’d known all along. “There you go,” he said. “Told you.” I didn’t remember him telling me anything.

The mentioned that the ramps were narrow. Narrow enough that I immediately knew I didn’t want to be the one driving. “Hey man,” I said to Eric, “would you mind pulling it up?”

“Why me?” he asked. “Because you do math for a living,” I said. “And I trust that.”

He sighed. Took off his flip flops. Got in the car. What followed was one of the most quietly surreal moments of my life.

At three in the morning, in a dark French yard, my friend — barefoot, half asleep, wearing a t-shirt and board shorts— carefully aligned an eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes with two metal rails while a man from England illuminated the scene with a single flashlight that swung slightly in the breeze.

Slowly. Inch by inch. No drama. No speeches. The car went up the ramp.

Mike clapped once. Satisfied. “Perfect,” he said. “Cheers.”

Mike shook my hand. Firm grip. Friendly He shook my hand. Told me he was going to head down to Carcassonne now. Let me get this straight: this man had just driven from England to Beaune, and now, at 3 a.m., he was going to continue 600 kilometers south in a van towing a car that might still be haunted before sunrise?

Godspeed, Mike. May your socks never fall.

He got in the van. The engine started. He drove off. The taillights disappeared down the road.

Eric and I stood there in the dark, watching the taillights disappear. We didn’t say anything for a moment. Then Eric turned to me and said, “Did that actually happen?” I wasn’t sure. But it felt like something that would show up in a therapy session one day.

When Mike pulled away into the pre-dawn dark, I didn’t think about the risk I’d just taken. I was too fogged up from sleep deprivation, wine hangover, and whatever spiritual tax you pay when you’ve been juggling guest arrivals and car corpses in Burgundy for three weeks straight.

But the next morning? It hit me.

I had just handed over a very expensive Mercedes to a man I’d never met, wearing knee-high athletic socks, at 3 a.m., with no paperwork, no receipt, and no tow truck. Just a van and a box trailer that looked like it doubled as a mobile lawn care unit.

And he was now towing it across 600+ kilometers of French countryside. Threading a needle doesn’t even begin to describe it.

If it arrived, I’d have to lean hard on Maday, my Carcassonne-based friend and part-time miracle worker. But even that wasn’t the biggest threat.

Because we were approaching... August.