Highway 80 Catastrophe!

So this past friday, my boyfriend and I woke up at like 4 a.m. and got on the road at around 5:30 a.m. to get to Sacramento from Reno. Well, Thursday night highway 80 had been closed for that big car pile up, so we couldn't leave thursday as planned. We're on the highway and my boyfriend puts on his chains. About 20 minutes later, one of the cables snaps on the driver side and it's making an awful noise so we pull over. He's like "oh crap, what do we do??" and instantly (always hoping to be in an emergency situation so I can show off my sick survival skills), I say "a hair tie! we'll tie it down with a hair tie!" but it turns out I couldn't find one... But, I did find a twist tie (like the bread bag closer things). So he ties the cable back on with the twist tie and we keep going down the road... for possibly five minutes. Once the hair tie fails, I scrounge around for a hair tie and when I find one, he uses it to secure the cable once more. We get about 5 miles down the road (close to where you start seeing signs for farad) and the cable comes loose. Having no more hair ties, we're both sitting in the car at the side of the road wondering what to do and finally I get excited and exclaim "a shoelace!" So we take one of the shoelaces out of my chuck taylors and he cuts it up and secures the cable in two different places. Everything is going great, until we get to the California ag check. We're about 100 feet away from ag check when all of a sudden, the passenger side cable just flies off! So now, we're stuck (because legally we can't drive the car without chains and we're out of resources) and my boyfriend FINALLY calls AAA. So they tell him he'll get a free tow, (blah, blah, blah) and we wait about 30 mins in front of ag check. Well, when the tow guy arrives, we discover that he's romanian and english isn't one of his specialties. So he says some things to us outside that we don't really understand and hooks up the car. When we get into his truck/back on the road, he tells us that AAA doesn't cover a tow when you aren't having engine trouble! So I was thinking "oh well, I have a credit card, his parents can pay me back later" until I asked how much it was to be towed- it was a wopping $260 per hour!!! Thankfully, this fella was pretty nice and said he wasn't going to charge us and took us to the nearest AAA approved shop where we tipped him and paid about 1,000,000 dollars to buy new chains and have them installed. After a few hours later, we made it home safe and all was right in the world (6 hours for a 2 hour trip!)