Something Shiny!

Turns out I was a little off-base on the whole “best birthday present evah” proclamation this year. Allow me to explain. For John’s birthday, I got him a hiking trip in the Plott Balsams of North Carolina. I should preface this tale by saying that I’ve been working on this trip, researching every angle, for a year. I rented us a cabin that borders a 1500-acre Nature Conservancy preserve, with hiking trails just out the front door. We outfitted ourselves with everything we’d need to go on day hikes for a couple days; we were prepared to the hilt. After I was done teaching on Friday, we set out (with our dog, Luke) for the 9-hour drive. Honestly, we thought that having the dog in the car for nine hours was going to be the worst part of the trip. Oh, how wrong we were! We made it into Cherokee, North Carolina, around midnight and proceeded to follow the directions to the cabin. Perhaps we should have sensed danger when we turned onto the one-lane gravel road that led us up the mountain. But nowhere on the websites for the cabin did it say “you will need a 4-wheel drive to get to your destination.” I digress. The road was narrow, there was a sheer drop on one side, and the switchbacks… don’t get me started about the switchbacks. We drove deeper and deeper into the forest, climbing the steep mountain with my Saturn. That part of it was terrifying enough. The directions said, “watch out for oncoming cars.” To what end? It was a narrow, one-lane road to begin with! There was no place to pull off. Thankfully, at now 1 in the morning, we didn’t meet any oncoming cars.

We finally found the road that would lead us to the cabin. My transmission was starting to overheat, due to the incredible incline we were making the car scale. And then we started to slide. We regrouped and tried again, to no avail. We were now stuck on the side of a mountain with no way to turn around. The transmission was overheating. It was pitch black. The only option open to us was to get down the mountain backwards. John put the car in reverse and inched down the mountain while I hung my head out the window and gave him directions. Bit by bit, we made our way back to a switchback where we could turn the car to face forward down the mountain. We proceeded a bit further until I smelled the brakes. Oh, good. The transmission was already overheating and we had the heat on full blast to compensate for that. Now the brakes were starting to fail. We pulled off into a flat-ish driveway to give things a minute to cool down. When we started moving again, we’d lost the brakes. We were still several thousand feet up on the side of the mountain with a failing transmission and no brakes. I checked my cell phone, thinking that we might be able to get a tow truck to come save us. No cell service. We sat in that driveway, letting things cool down, and hoping against hope that the brakes would come back. After about 20 minutes, we decided to try getting down the mountain again, using what little brakes had come back, along with the emergency brake. We eeked down the mountain inches at a time, smelling the brakes the entire way.

Somehow, against all odds, we held it together and got back into Cherokee. We had no idea what damage had been done to the car, no way of knowing how we were going to get home. But at that point, it was 3 am. We needed a place to sleep. But all the motel signs we’d seen on our way to the mountain had been clear: no pets. We pulled into the Days Inn and I talked to the night manager. With our hair-raising escape fresh in my mind, I took a deep breath and explained our predicament. I’m sure I looked crazed and I know I started crying. She took pity on us and gave us a cabin up the road– the Days Inn didn’t allow pets and there was too much of a chance we’d be caught, she explained. The cabin she offered us didn’t allow pets either, but she said we could sneak Luke in. We got to the cabin, which smelled and looked like hell, but it had a bed and at that point, that’s all we cared about. We spent the night and drove back the next morning. Miraculously, the car made it to Gainesville. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life, and I don’t know how we made it off that mountain alive.

So, yeah, not the best birthday present. But at least we lived to tell the tale. (And sorry to those who thought my “buns in the oven” reference meant that I was giving John a baby for his birthday.)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 9:37 am and is filed under NaBloPoMo, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.