The Dumb GPS

My family and I went to Arkansas one summer for about two weeks. It was a typical vacation for my family, because on our third day there we had quite the adventure! That morning my mom yelled at us to hurry up and get in the car so we could get on the road. We all hurried out to the car in hopes that she wouldn’t yell at us again. Once everyone was ready to go, we headed off on the winding roads through the tiny mountains, more like giant red rocks though.

We were on the road for about an hour and my dad stopped at a little jerky store to get something to drink and snack on before we got to the crystal mines.
 

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I found a cat there and wanted to take it with us, but my mom said no. I just think she was a crab that day or something. From there we headed off and our Tom-Tom, more like Dumb-Dumb, told us to turn onto this two track dirt road. We listened to the GPS since we were on vacation and had no idea where to go to get anywhere. We were on this road for a good 35 minutes and seen two houses near the road we turned from and only about three/four cars the whole time we were on the road. It was like we’d been abducted and put on a foreign planet with no other human life. We were aliens on these trails. Then suddenly, my dad stopped the car and told us that it would be awhile before we could go farther. It was then that we realized that there was a tree down in front of us. We all got out of the car to stretch and as my dad was walking around the car he noticed that we had a flat tire too.

That was a definite problem, but a very typical vacation for our family. We had been renting the car and therefore we didn’t even know if there was a spare tire in the trunk of the jeep, let alone a full spare. Luckily, there was one, and my dad had the flat tire off and the new tire on in about thirty minutes or so. One problem was solved, but the other still lay ahead of us, literally. We had to move the tree that had been blocking the road. We tried to push it off to the side but it only sprang back onto the road. But we had an idea; my mom would drive the car through while my dad held the branches back so the jeep could get through. YAY! We made it out of that mess! We were on that little two track for about another two hours after that. There was no cell phone service at all. And we were twisting and turning through the real mountains, you could even see over the edge at some points.

For the most part all we had was the company of each other and the radio when it got signal from the satellites. We finally made it out of that mess and a song came on the radio, singing “We’re coming home, we’re coming home, tell the world that we’re coming home,” which we thought was hilarious, considering. Tom-Tom finally got us back on track to getting to the crystal mine, our destination in the first place.