Dad Drives 360 Mi., Finds He Left Mom in Redding

An Oregon woman was stranded 360 miles from home by her family who accidentally drove off without her from a California hamburger stand on their way back from a Christmas trip.

“I’m his wife, so I knew he wouldn’t look for me until he got all the way home,” Pat Zimmer, 36, said.

She finally made it back home to Eugene on Monday--about five hours after her family--on a bus, paying her fare with a credit card because she had only 23 cents on her.

“At first, when I saw him drive away, I really wasn’t sure whether he was stranding me on purpose or if it was an accident,” she said.

Kenneth Zimmer, 36, his wife and five children were returning from a Christmas visit to San Francisco when they stopped at a hamburger stand in Red Bluff.

“He’d asked me if I wanted anything to eat, and I said, ‘No.’ ” But she changed her mind and went in later.

“He was sitting down to eat his burger as I came in and went to the bathroom. While I was sitting down to eat my hamburger, he got up and got into the van.

“There I was, all wrapped up in my burger,” she said, when she noticed the family van going out over the overpass.

Kenneth Zimmer arrived in Eugene at 6 a.m. and woke his children, who were sleeping in the back of the van. “They asked where mommy was,” Pat Zimmer said her husband told her.

“He started making phone calls to the Highway Patrol, and I don’t know who else,” she said. “He probably was more frantic than I was.”