I don't have much time to blog, I just wanted to update and tell people about my President's day adventure. I’ll set the scene first: It was 1:00 in the afternoon on President’s day, and I was out geocashing with some friends in an old 1996 Ford F150. The roads we were taking seemed to be nothing more than ATV trails. They were covered in a blanket of snow that had fallen the night before. On our way back from our destination, we accidentally navigated ourselves into a deep puddle, and got stuck. The excursion hadn’t been well planned; it was a spur of the moment activity. We had only figured on being gone from the dorms for about 2 hours so we hadn’t brought anything but light sweaters, and a couple water bottles. Well, when the truck got stuck, we tried everything we could think of to get it out. We worked for about twenty minutes before I suggested we should probably say a prayer, which we did. Then the truck still didn’t move. Still unaware of the danger we seemed to be in, we tried to get a hold of someone to come pull us out of the puddle. We looked, and only one of the four cell phones had a signal. We tried to call our friend B who has a truck (I’ll have to tell you about him some time, he’s a scream), but he was in the middle of something, and said he’d call us back. Then the phone died. We still didn’t panic, but we were a little more aware of our situation, so the two guys who were in the group offered to climb a near-by hill to see if they could get a signal. The rest of us stayed in the truck and prayed. I don’t think I have ever prayed as hard as I did that day. It was nice to know that God was there, watching over us. The excursion to the top of the hill had been unsuccessful. This left us two choices: 1, Hike out the perceived six miles to the highway, or 2. Stay in the truck and pray that B would come find us. I didn’t feel right about the first option, everything I’ve ever learned told me to stay in the truck and keep everyone together. So we sat. and waited. We realized B didn’t really have our exact coordinates, and he would need those to get to us. We tried removing the battery from the phone and replacing it to see if we could squeeze a few more minutes out of it. It worked and we were able to send the coordinates we pulled off the GPS. It only worked because of a prayer, because the second the text was sent, the phone died again. After that we sat and waited and prayed. At about 1 in the morning, we saw some lights on the horizon. Rescue had come. We had spent 10 hours in the truck, as the temperature slowly dropped to around 6*. Everyone (except me) looked like they had just returned from an alien abduction, they were hungry (we hadn’t eaten since 11 that morning) they were cold (6*) and they were tired (1AM!!!), but I was still just fine… (I frequently skip a meal or two, I am somewhat impervious to cold, and I rarely make it to bed before 2AM, so, I was just an hour after my bedtime.) After the paramedics checked us out, we went to bed, safe and sound.
I learned a few things from that experience; it’s nice to have fun, but even better to be alive. Being scared makes being hungry seem unimportant. Keeping a good sense of humor is vital in scary situations, and prayer works. Period!
Well, that's all I have time for for now, wishing you all the best!
-PenningJade
No comments:
Post a Comment