Weekends are for Adventures
I am notorious for having adventures. A simple 40 minute trip can become a two-hour excursion with me at the wheel, or even just in the car. I can turn practically anything into an adventure, usually just by naming it so. Weekends are especially good for adventures and I should know better than to expect things to go smoothly.
This weekend I drove up to have breakfast with two of my college friends and go hiking in a state park. The only problem with our plan was that hunting season is on and the state park was entirely open to hunters. Not a super safe place to be hiking. So we opted for a smaller park over in West Virginia. And everything went super smoothly, we had a great time catching up and hiking along the trails and around the lake. It was a cloudy, cool-ish day, and it drizzled a little bit when we first arrived, but our hike was dry and we went at least five miles before calling it a day. I was so proud of not getting lost on my way out there that I was quite confident that the trip home would be adventure free as well. We have a GPS in our car so even though I couldn’t get a signal to look up directions on my phone, I knew I could get back one way or another, between that and directions from my friends.
I got off to a rough start. My directions were to turn left out of the park and right when I got to rout 30. In my head I had left, right playing over and over, but I didn’t think about turning out of the parking lot and with my GPS a little confused on where exactly I was at that moment, I went left instead of right and instantly knew my mistake. So I turned around a little ways up the road and got back on track. Later I would find a voicemail on my phone from my friend telling me to turn around.
After my initial faulty start it was smooth sailing back to PA and all the way onto 376. I didn’t get lost, it didn’t even really rain all that much, and it was a beautiful rout to drive with all the leaves and the fall colors. Very relaxing. But I can’t go anywhere without turning it into an adventure one way or another and sometimes, it’s not my fault. This time it was good old PennDot and their insistance on closing parts of 376 during the most inconvenient times possible. Like rush hour on a Saturday. I had thought to check the tunnels for closings as they do that a lot as well, but they were clear. It didn’t even occur to me that they might close 376 elsewhere. But there it was, a big blinking sign telling me that 376 was closed ahead and to follow the detour. I’ve done the detour before. It’s not a fun time, but it’s do-able. Once you get passed the first small town it gets better, usually.
The first stretch was worse than usual and I was at first frustrated with the whole thing. I found myself sitting stopped in traffic for minutes at a time, even enough to pull out my kindle and read a little before the car in front of me would inch forward a little before returning to it’s full stop. It was that bad. So I put on some old podcasts to keep me company while I waited and crawled through one town, up some back roads, through another town, more back roads, and then one more town to take me into Pittsburgh and back to 376. The trip out took me an hour, including a stop for gas. The trip home was three hours. I inched my way along a distance that should have taken me like ten/twenty minutes, for two hours. It was most impressive. I wasn’t even mad once I got past the first section and realized that this was going to be my entire trip. I just resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t getting home any time soon and went with it.
Once I did get home my husband and I decided we didn’t feel like cooking, so we grabbed some Sheetz food and watched the latest episode of The Flash and then a few episodes of Superman the animated series. We got our pictures back from our anniversary shoot and then I broke my computer’s charger. So, you know, there’s that. It was a weirdly bitter-sweet kind of Saturday, but I’ve come to realize that good and bad days are really attitude dependent. Saturday had all the potential of a bad day, but it wasn’t. I had an awesome day with friends, spent some time in traffic and then had a good evening with a husband who loves me enough to order a new cord for me off Amazon the moment it broke. No scolding or disappointed lectures on care of electronics. He just looked up the cord and placed the order so I could get back to my laptop by Friday. I have been super blessed and it took an almost bad day to remind me of that.
‹ Little Boy, Big Pile of Leaves It’s Coming ›