An away-from-Houghton adventure

Yesterday Adam, Steve, and I borrowed Alexa's car and drove to Rochester to see Avatar in 3D. I drove, and no, we did not get lost. There was a lot of traffic as we got close to the city, and there were pretty strong winds, but everything went fine. We got to the theater and watched the movie, which was almost 3 hours long. The story was really cliché, but the effects and the 3D were really cool, so it was worth seeing.

Afterward we went to Adam's house for dinner. His mom made us calzones, which were amazing, and we had real salad, so much fresher than Houghton's, and brownies and ice cream for dessert. It was a delicious meal.

Then it was time to drive back, which was when it really became an adventure. Steve drove, since I'd driven the whole way there. It was snowing a little, and it was dark since it was about 9:30 by the time we left. We made it onto the highway and back off fine and continued to follow the directions I'd gotten from Mapquest. But the directions must have been wrong, because we'd been going for a while and hadn't seen the road we were supposed to turn onto.

Then I suddenly recognized where we were--the tiny town of Short Tract, which was really ironic because Eri and I and some other people had been lost there on the way back from church a few weeks ago. We'd called Dan and he had looked up directions and told us how to get back, so I was pretty sure I remembered. But we'd driven past the road we needed to take, so we had to turn around, and the inside of the car was getting really fogged up and the defrost wasn't working very well, so Steve pulled over so we could clear it up. But he'd pulled onto a side road with a good amount of snow on it, and it turned out to be deeper than it looked. We opened a window and wiped the fog off the windshield, and then Steve tried to pull back onto the road. But we couldn't get out--we were stuck in a ditch.

I definitely had a moment of panic, wondering what we were going to do. Adam and I got out of the car and Steve drove forward, able to move in that direction but still not able to get back on the road. It really looked like we were stuck there. Then Steve tried backing up, and as Adam and I watched the back end of the car pulled up and out of the ditch, and the front end followed. After jumping up and down in celebration, Adam and I got back in the car. Steve turned it around, very careful not to go back in the ditch, and we drove back the way we'd come. We had to turn around several more times because I was confused about whether the road we needed was on the left or right, but we found it, and it was the right one.

It was about 15 or 20 minutes back to Houghton from there. The only other problem we had was that Steve's window wouldn't close--Alexa's car is pretty old and beat up, and the driver's side window gets stuck. There's a special way you have to close it, but I didn't remember what that was, so we had to drive the rest of the way with the cold wind blowing right into the car. I felt really bad for poor Steve!

But we did make it back, finally; it was almost midnight and I'd expected to get back around 11. It was definitely an adventure, with its scary moments, but it ended well and makes a good story. It was great to get away from Houghton for 9 hours and see a movie in a theater and eat a real meal in a house with a family.

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Right now I'm half-watching the Olympics. The biathlon is on, which is a weird sport. Before that was ski jumping, which was pretty cool. Hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the figure skating tonight.