No Winter Maintenance

 

Now that summer has passed and some time has passed to allow for healing, I can share this adventure from summer.

 

On a fine day, I thought it would be a marvellous idea to take the children to Metcalfe rock to hike and play on the rocks. I also think it is rather marvellous to take a new way every time I go somewhere, you never know what adventures may come.

 

Thus, on Grey road 13 I turned left. I was looking at a several editions old copy of the Bruce trail map and google maps on my phone. I knew  I had to head north- west and I would get there eventually. If a road looked interesting I went that way. Eventually I landed on a no winter maintenance road and I thought what fun! The road was rough, but not bad. However,  it just started getting worse. The puddles were getting bigger and bigger, and I realised I could not turn around, and I really didn't want to drive through what I had already driven though again. The hope was it would get better.

 

It didn't.

 

Then I hit the puddle, and got though it, well just to the edge and the car stalled. I had flooded the engine.

 

I didn't want to call Luke right away, I thought we would wait 20minites and try the car again. Meanwhile the children played with frogs and played in the forest. Silently I am freaking out with my mind going 10, 00miles of possibilities.

 

The 20minites did not help. Car would not start. Call Luke and admit I have done a very bad thing.

What follows is three hours of getting a CAA membership on my rapidly declining cell phone, and figuring out exactly where I was only to realise I WAS NOT ON A ROAD!

 

Apparently, I had gone off the no winter maintenance road to a snowmobile trail. No warning, no nothing. Thing is, CAA only responds to calls on roads. So I was kind of in the middle of no where with very happy and agreeable Ever and whining/ complaining Maya. Sure we could walk out of there but what about the car. Leave it for deer hunters??

 

Meanwhile, all afternoon in between my mental breakdowns and fits of crying we had been working. In the forest we had found three landscaping buckets, you know with the holes in them. We spent hours bailing out that puddle, it had actually been to the height of the grass. Head to toe we were covered in mud when a bearded man on a ATV found us.

 

He told me how you are not suppose to drive this way cause it is a swap. How when he was a teenager it was a corduroy road  and on the weekends he would drive home from Collingwood this way but big trucks mudding had wreaked the road, and he told me he could get the car out of the puddle. I had never prayed so hard as when he made several attempts to get the engine started. I had never cheered so loud when he got through the puddle. I cried and hugged him freely. Which to those who know me is very rare. I offered him any amount of money he wanted. He refused, but I got his name and when I made it back to town I bought a case of beer cause that is what he drinks and made sure he would get it.

 

Lesson learned: You have to drive slowly though water, and maybe the road well travelled is Ok sometimes.