A Rather Unfortunate Pickle

Sometimes we make bad decisions, like following the GPS to a trail head in Frontenac Provincial Park only to notice that the country road you are driving on is getting narrower and muddier and then slushier.  Instead of calling it early, turning around and heading home, you tell yourself "Ah, it'll be fine.  I am sure this is just a short snowy stretch."  At which point, of course, your van gets stuck in the slush and begins to slide back down the road at a 45 degree angle towards the lake at the bottom.  Fantastic.  And so, instead of the wonderful spring time hike that you've been looking forward to all week, you wait with your very hyper and very disappointed seven year old for two hours until the tow truck arrives...all the while simultaneously thanking the heavens that your cell phone works and cursing yourself for doing something so dumb and ruining everyone's day.

Waiting for the tow truck.

As it turns out, the tow truck came from the opposite direction than we drove in from and could not even reach us due to the slush on the part of the road we did not even make it to.  Thankfully, the driver walked out to us, offered to drive our van backwards in a controlled slide back onto the road and down the slushy, icy hill, turn it around for us on the soggy, muddy shoulder and then drive it back up the steep hairpin turn that we drove down to get there.  Needless to say, Liam and I were very grateful to Mr. Tow Truck Driver today for his vastly superior winter driving skills that got us out of a rather unfortunate pickle.  Things could have been much worse.

One hundred dollars later we returned from whence we came having done no hiking at all but thankful that we did not damage the van or ourselves.  It was an eventful, though wholly disappointing afternoon, that I will hopefully never repeat.  The moral of today's story: if the road looks questionable, it probably is.  Next time I will just turn around and drive the other way.