A Day in our Lives

Have you ever known someone whose life seems full of adventures and strange occurrences on a daily basis? I’ve had friends tell me that my life is rather unique and that if they hadn’t witnessed some of the daily events firsthand, they would surely believe I was making it up. I simply laugh as, to me, it doesn’t seem strange at all and I always thought everyone had things like this happen to them on a daily basis. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about:

Not too long ago, my boyfriend and I decided to put all our things into storage and travel for a while to see where the road would take us - a road trip, so to speak, with no planned destination, but rather simply for the purpose of seeing what there is to see. We packed minimal clothes so that we didn’t crowd ourselves in the car, filled up the tank with gas, checked the tires, lit a candle, said a prayer and took off on our new adventure After driving for several hours, and, as I mentioned, having no concrete plans to speak of, we decided to call it a day when the rain started to come down so hard that we could barely see what was in front of us. Once that decision was made, we were on the lookout for a place to spend the night - the problem was that we were out on a deserted road with no hotels, etc., anywhere in sight.

After driving for roughly thirty minutes, we passed a somewhat rundown barn which, for all practical purposes, appeared to be abandoned. We pulled over and decided to discuss whether this was a good idea or not. We debated the pros and cons of actually sleeping in the barn without permission from the owners, etc. However, the fact that we were tired won out and we spent that night in said rundown barn. Considering its exterior condition, it was very comfortable inside and I was grateful for a night wherein we didn’t have to sleep stretched out across the front seat of our car since it was cold outside.

The next morning, as we packed up and began to get ready to leave the barn, we were approached by a car with four, possibly five, young people inside. We both thought they were the owners of the barn and we were about to get an earful of how inappropriate it was to just sleep in someone’s barn, but it wasn’t that at all. The girl in the passenger seat jumped out of the car holding a suspicious looking package wrapped in brown paper in her hands and when she gets close enough to me to almost touch me, she hands me said package and says “it’s my birthday and I’m spreading the joy - enjoy” and then gets back in the car and, just as quickly as they appeared, they disappeared on down the road.

I couldn’t handle the suspense, thus I immediately ripped the paper off and opened the box and discovered it was a chocolate birthday cake. We started breaking off pieces to eat as we stood in front of the car after realizing we had not eaten anything yet that day and were hungry. The cake was chocolate with cream cheese frosting and strawberry filling which tasted better than anything I’d ever had before - or maybe we were just starving (my mom always said hunger made the food taste better LOL) We went back inside the barn, washed our hands and put the remainder of the cake in the box in the back seat before getting back on the road to continue our adventure.

The rain from the night before made the countryside look beautiful this morning as we drove out. After driving past miles of plains, we came across a beautiful field of golden marigold flowers with a bull standing right stark in the middle of the field. For all practical purposes, the bull appeared as if he had stopped to smell the flowers - the scene reminded me of the movie Ferdinand about the gentle bull that loved to smell the flowers and hated to fight lol. The memory of that image kept a smile on my face for most of the day.

We continued driving through the rolling hills for approximately 45 miles, before we came upon a small town. It was so quaint, the entire downtown area consisted of five small city blocks. Due to its small size, we were able to drive through downtown catching all the green lights! Of course, it helped that there were only two lights in town but I still considered it a lucky day for us.

On our way out of town, we saw a frozen pond which looked so inviting that we couldn’t help ourselves. The little kid in both of us came out, and, before you knew it, we had our skates on and were happily skating around the pond. We must have gone around the pond a total of eight or nine times before beginning to realize that it was time to eat something again. As we began to weigh the options of where we could go to get something to eat, being that we were on an unfamiliar road, in a town we didn’t know and as we were discussing whether we saw a restaurant while driving through downtown, we saw a pear tree growing out in the wild. We changed out of our skates, walked on over and picked a few off the tree and headed on back to the car where we sat on the hood and ate some of them before heading out to get a full meal somewhere.

A few miles out of town, we came across a quaint mom and pop inn with a great diner adjacent to the lobby. We pulled in for a full night of good food and sleep. The dinner at the diner was rather top notch, as diners go. The beds were fluffy and the room was cozy - just what the doctor ordered, as the saying goes.

We laughed as we went over the day’s events as we were writing in our road trip journal - if we hadn’t lived through it, we wouldn’t have believed all that was possible in just one day, but there you have it. A day in the life of our beautiful road trip adventure where we take one day at a time and see where it takes us. As we finished our chocolate cake before going to bed for the evening, we smiled and agreed that we can’t wait to see what tomorrow will bring. Then we snuggled in bed until we fell asleep not knowing where the road will take us tomorrow but more than willing to find out after a good night’s sleep.