Life at HDC is always crazy, so I've learned to expect the unexpected. This past weekend was our staff retreat, and I must admit that I was expecting an uneventful, relaxing weekend. We certainly had some relaxing times, but there were some exciting adventures which I wasn't expecting.
First of all, it took us longer than it should have to get there. Jan, Jess, Dorrin, Margaret, Ben (who came back for this) and I all drove up together, and Andy and Cheryl had gone up earlier to start heating up the cabin. Our directions were interesting, and not quite accurate. We lost cell phone reception at times, winding in, around, and over mountains, but managed to get ahold of Andy and tell him that we weren't quite sure where we were. He tried to call us back later, which involved him trying all six of our cell phones until he finally found somebody's phone that got reception. He gave us more accurate directions and/or we figured it out ourselves, and we got there eventually.
Over the course of the weekend, we took turns cooking meals, watched some movies and TV shows, talked, and took turns playing Andy and Cheryl's Wii. Five of the eight of us are taking the Perspectives class, so we worked on that some too. Chris came up for a few hours on Saturday, and we spent some time sharing and discussing our dreams.
Saturday afternoon, Jan, Ben, Jess and I decided to go hiking at the nearby Trough Creek State Park. We saw some huge icicles, an ice mine, a suspension bridge, and a waterfall throughout the hike. We took several different paths, and guess that we went about four miles overall. The last section of our hike was on a trail marked difficult. At one point, we got off the trail we were following and ended up hiking up another trail, which had a steep ascent, to the ridge. It provided an excellent view of part of Raystown Lake, but wasn't where we were supposed to be. We were never lost, as we could have easily retraced our steps. Instead, we took the more adventuresome and fun option, and we bushwacked our way back down the ridge and found the trail and where we needed to go. We decided that the park should not only repaint the blazes that mark the trail, but that at some points they need to re-blaze the trail, as we were often climbing over logs and guessing where the next blaze was. We got back to the car right around dark, and overall, it was a lot of fun.
The weekend went well, but the most eventful part happened as we were getting ready to leave. It had rained all morning. Snow would have been much better and more fun to drive through, but we were glad for the rain due to the steep driveway, which would not have been fun to drive down. This, however, soon became the least of our worries as we attempted to leave. We had packed the car and all climbed in, and Jess started driving - only to realize that if we continued straight, we would be going over a two to three foot bank which separted the space in front of the garage from the rest of the driveway. We tried to back up, but our back tires just spun on the slippery snow and ice. After getting out of the car, we realized that if we went forward, our front right tire would go over the bank, and the car would bottom out, leaving the front right tire hanging over the bank. Pushing the van backwards was out of the question because we were on a hill. Luckily, Andy and Cheryl had not left yet, and Andy began figuring out what to do. The cabin was recently built, so there were some extra beams and boards and rocks around the cabin. We used the beams as levers to lift the back end of the van, so that we could put boards underneath the back right tire to serve as a ramp. We put another ramp under the front right tire. Using team work, all eight of us worked to build multiple ramps, provide leverage, push, direct, and drive - talk about teamwork! It took us around an hour to finally get all four wheels of the van back on solid ground, and there was an audible sigh of relief when it finally happened. To top it off, the tire leaked a little bit during this process. We drove slowly with our hazard lights on, attemping to find a gas station or an open service station (impossible, due to the fact that it was Sunday), or a farm that would have an air compressor. We finally found someone at home, who gave us enough to get to the nearest gas station ten miles away, although he called us 'tourists' and was not overally excited to be helping us.
Inbetween helping Andy and following his directions, we got a few pictures. The pictures above (as well as my attempted description) don't really show how truly crazy the situation was...
Despite getting lost (to some extent) twice and getting stuck, it was still a really fun weekend, and we certainly made some pretty unforgettable memories!
No comments:
Post a Comment