All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

I just spent the loveliest week in the mountains. It was cool, almost cold at night, the air was fresh and crisp with just a hint of pine, and there was nothing much to do but take it easy and hang out with Nathan. I found myself going to bed at 8:30 several nights in a row. Who does that? Not me! Nathan got to play in the creek, go for little hikes and see his first deer which he said baa at. I guess deer and sheep look a little alike, right? There were no bears, no injuries, and it was all relatively uneventful, the way you want it to be, until...

Friday morning I was up at 3:30 am, unable to sleep. I often have trouble sleeping the night before a trip and we were planning to leave for home at about 6:00 am Texas time. Nathan was restless too because we were sharing a room and I was moving around too much. At 5:30 I woke up my Mom and Dono so that we could pack up the car. By 6:00 we had said goodbye to my aunt and uncle that had come in last night, the boys were in the car, all the groceries and luggage were in the car and we began down the "driveway". (for lack of a better word to describe the short dirt path between the cabin and the bridge to the road.) We stopped short once we could see the bridge because where the bridge should have been there was only a horridly swollen creek. If I were to stand in the creek on a normal day our bridge would be about waist high on me and the creek would be just over my ankles. On the lovely Friday morning in question the creek was about a foot an a half above previously mentioned bridge. So my moms little Honda Accord was probably not going to make it over without drifting down into the creek. So we backed up, ate breakfast and checked on the water level every hour or so. It was going down, slowly, and all we could do was hope that it would go down enough that we could get out before the rain storm that was supposed to arrive around noon got here. At about 12:00pm we decided to make a go for it. The water on the bridge was only mid-calf by this point and they had had a back hoe through to clear out some of the debris further down. My uncle, in his truck, went ahead of up so that he could haul us out if we drifted away. Very reassuring...not. But we made it and as we headed into town we could see the storm clouds moving over the mountains. We were 6 hours behind schedule and wouldn't get home until 12:30am but there was no going back. It just felt good to be on our way home...finally.