Lifestyle of Wandering: Reflections of a Wanderer

Wow, so yesterday was the first day down here, and what a day it was. To start with, I’m not a big fan of mapquest. And after yesterday I’m REALY not a big fan.After being lead down a series of progressively less navigatible “Roads” we eventually got to the soon to be NFS 51. if any of you have ever driven in sand dunes, up and down side to side, then you will be able to picture the driving condition. “But wait, there’s more!!!!” now add palmetto’s and scrub brush so close to the side of the road, that at several points we simply had to gun it to force our way though. These are full sized tree’s mind you. Still in all for the majority of this section it was fun. Our huge 16 passenger van sits so high, that we rocked and pitched like some tiny ship in a tempest, or a friggin awesome rollercoaster. I was feeling pretty confident in moms driving, and was impressed with how she had handled some of the tight spaces {though a bit over cautiously} so I was about five seconds to late to ask, when she merrily plowed into the deceptively calm looking sand pit. “Mom, do you uhh….remember how to drive in sand?” {whump} back axle hits ground. “No I don’t” well in the end we only spent a few hours stranded there, Jed and I decided to head for the primitive campground we were supposed to be heading for. And hopefully find some to pull us out. After all we were only .25 miles from it!!!! Curse you mapquest! three and a half miles later, we finally reached said camp. And were greeted with a sign proclaiming “Open October 1- June 1” it being the 16^th of June we were…. Disheartened. No biggie, we’ll just walk back the 3.5 errmmmm .25 miles and tell every one. Well we prayed that god would send us some one to pull us out. We had no signal on any of the three phones in our group no signal on the computer, and figured we would be out here some time if we had to wait for some one to find us. As we walked Jed pointed excitedly is that a Truck? And sure enough we could see the back end of a truck sitting on the side of the road. “Yes! Proclaimed some one there will have to ba able to help us.” When we got there it was rather bazaar. After taking a closer look it appeared that some time the night before someone {insert drunken redneck name here} had been traveling down this road at a ….high rate of speed. At this speed they didn’t see the 36” diameter log laying across the road, which they hit at said high rate of speed. The end result was they snapped off the log with enough force to completely snap off there front end in the process, and pushed the log some forty feet. Then bounced over the log and slid sidways another 40-50 feet be for coming to a stop 16 inches from yet another fallen tree that surly would have skewered the vehicle. The note read, in scrawl. “ChArlY _____ Be bAcK In tHe MorNin!

Well no rescue there but shortly after that we heard the roar of a ridiculously over powered engine and new help was on the way. {or maybe charly} we were rescued by four guys in a huge jacked up truck, who seemed to think it was quite funny that we had some how gotten our massively over laden Van down NFS 51 “Why did you ever go down there?” well in the end it was fine, Rachael and mom had a good time typing, and the kids played with there buckets and shovel in the sand. After we got pulled out we got to swim in the blue hole. A local swimming hole spring, that was more black than blue.

But the awesome thing about that, was that the last time we had been there was 1989 when I was a mere 7! Wow it was really cool to see it again, I Remember catching a tiny turtle about the size of a quarter. Once again God kept us safe {in spite of the devil and all his wiles…. Mapquest} and we had a very enjoyable time. Anything less than this would be …. Well boring. And to any of you who know our family, this is all routine. At least it didn’t happen in a 72 datsun pickup that runs on propane, right after a hurricane….. today we head down to our next destination. As Jed so affectionately put it. “Florida’s very own alligator petting zoo. The Everglades” oohhhhh yeah!!!!!