Anyways....back to the story. Jordan and I went for the small birthday gathering. We were supposed to meet at a local petting zoo, but that plan changed due to unstoppable, so we just did lunch and presents. We ended up staying out there for the rest of the afternoon so Kylie, Marlys, and I could go to a Church meeting later in the evening. The meeting got over around 8:30 p.m. and we got back to Ky's house at 9:30 or so. Jordan and I stayed and chatted for a few minutes longer and left about 9:45 p.m. and it was still raining. We got on the road and planned on taking our normal route home, which included a short drive on the highway and then the rest of the way home on a part-paved-part-gravel road.
The highway was fine, and the first few miles of the paved part of the last stretch home was fine and then we got to the "gravel" road. Red flags and bells should have been going off in my head when there was a small lake at the end of the pavement. There should have been bells going off...but there weren't. We plowed right through puddle with no problems and then we got to the mud. Twenty-five feet in I'm thinking, "Okay, Jordan is a good driver when it comes to weird circumstances like this, but it looks like we are going to need to go to the car wash on Monday." Right as this thought came into my mind I realized we were slowing down. Fifty feet in I'm thinking, "Man, this mud is kinda thick, we sure are slipping around." Mud had accumulated on our tires so much we had zero traction and we weren't going anywhere fast. One hundred feet in I'm thinking, "Why is Jordan steering the car into the ditch? This was a bad idea." On the right-hand side of the road there was a small shallow ditch and on the other side of that a hay field. Jordan's idea was to get up on the field and go as far as we could before getting down on the mud road again....well that idea was almost a disaster. It turned out that the ditch was more of a rut the perfect size of our tire. So we are sitting in the car and I'm convinced that our left front and rear tires were off the ground while the right front and rear tires were snuggly in the rut. There was a definite angle shift to my view out the windshield. At this point in time, if I would have rolled down the window I would have been able to touch the ground...
At this point I'm just laughing. I can't help it...Jordan and I get into these weird situations all the time and I just have to laugh. Of course, Jordan is sitting next to me trying to figure out how in the heck we are going to get out of this mess, so he throws it in reverse and then in drive, and then reverse, drive, reverse, drive, and then finally he magically get us up onto the field. I say magically because I literally don't know how he did it. So we are up on this hay field driving parallel to the muddy road and we go probably a quarter mile and then Jordan's shouts "we're goin down!" and before I know it we are down the small hill, over the ditch, and back into the mud. We went maybe twenty-five more feet and then a terrible metal on metal sound. Bad, bad idea. We just sat there and looked at each other and then I said "welllll, should we call someone?"
We made a couple quick phone calls to his cousin, Sean, who had just bought a new truck. No more than five minutes after we made the call a kid with a huge truck pulled up and asked if we needed some help. We told him that we had someone coming and he asked what kind of truck he had, we told him a Toyota Tacoma, and he suggested that we let him help because a Tacoma might not have been able to do the job (sorry Sean!). Of course we said yes and after a couple minutes we were all hooked up and off to the races we went. The mud was so thick that the guy towing us was almost having trouble pulling us, but after gathering a little speed we seemed to be okay. As we gained speed all sorts of mud was goin' everywhere! After a quarter mile this was our view from the inside of the car...pure mud.
Since Jordan couldn't see out the windshield the next logical option was the head out the window choice...
Resulting in....
Finally we got to the end of the "gravel" road. We were towed maybe a mile and a half and we had to deal with this:
That is three inches of mud...
Sean and his wife, Becky, met us at the end of the muddy road and escorted us back to their house for a little spray down.
Only partial view out of our windshield and headlights. Our poor car!
When we pulled out of our parking spot in the morning there was a pretty good amount of mud on the ground. We had no other option but to drive to church with our car all muddy. We got so many looks and laughs, it was funny. I don't think many people had ever seen a car so stinking muddy!
After all is said and done our car is fine and our marriage is still intact. Being married to Jordan is a huge adventure. I used to fight it and get upset at the crazy things he gets me into, but I've learned to just enjoy the fun of it. Sure one day we may get pulled over for popping a curb and driving where there is no road, sure we may break our car and have to pay thousands of dollars, sure we may get caught sneaking in an 'employees only' door...but that day is not today. I've learned to enjoy the crazy, embrace it even. I love my crazy, unconventional, adventurous husband.
