Off-Roading in a Malibu
Well, yesterday was just the Day of Disasters. Jess came to visit for the weekend. Her friends and she met me at my apartment and we went to lunch. Lunch was good, but I'm not sure her friends were too impressed with the restaurant. Ah well. Then we dropped the friends off and Jess, Meghan and I tried to go to Curtis Orchard. Hmmm. An apple orchard/pumpkin patch on a gorgeous fall Saturday afternoon. No one's gonna think of that! Yeah, it was super-crowded. We didn't even go in. Sad.
THEN Jess, Aarti and I were going to go on the Sidell Ghost Rally. The ghost rally is where you get this story, which is kind of a riddle, and you have to drive around these old country roads out in BuFu, IL. You have to figure out each step of the story, and at each stop you make, there's a clue you have to pick up. Usually there are people there to scare you, etc. It's a whole lot of fun, when it works out. Well, we made it through the first seven (of thirty) clues. Then we got lost. We weren't the only ones lost; it seemed like no one knew where they were going. We kept following random people to see if they had an idea, but they'd inevitably end up stopping for us to pass, and we'd pull up next to them and say "We're lost. Do you know where the next clue is?" and they'd shake their heads and laugh and say not to follow them; they're more lot than we are. So after about two hours of driving around in the middle of the freaking corn fields of Central Illinois (one of the roads we took could NOT have been good for my car.... I need to check it out in the daylight to make sure nothing fell off. It was a grass/dirt road with lots of bumps and tufts of grass reaching up to smack the bottom of your car), we decided to try to find our way back to Sidell.
Easier said than done. None of us were familiar with the area. At all. We tried to follow the clues backwards, but a lot of them are "After the curve in the road, there will be an unmarked crossroads. Left would be best." Well, when you're following that backwards, you have no idea which road you'd been on originally to take the left. Thank goodness Aarti has SOME knowledge of how country roads are numbered. The first few roads in the rally were named (1000 E and 370 N) so we figured as long as we could get to one of those, we'd be fine. But roads don't go through all the way... they stop at a field and continue on the other side, etc. <.sigh> And EVERYTHING looks the same. Everything. A corn field is a corn field. A barn is a barn. Especially in the dark. It was an ADVENTURE, man. We were beginning to discuss how we might go about calling 911 with a cell phone to have them direct us out of there (since the Ghost Rally is put on by the fire department). Ha. FINALLY we found 1000 E!!
So on our way back, one of the cars we had solicited for help earlier came by on their way home, I suppose, and they pulled up and said "There's nothing to find. Go to the square and get your money back." We had to ask for directions to the square. <.g> I love how directions consist of "Head into town. You'll see a brick road... go left, and the square will be catty-corner from the grocery store." We found it!! And we got our $15 back. The guy who was running it was cracking up, saying it was worth giving us $15 for the amusement we gave him at the first stop. (We'd been huddled together and screaming; he'd jumped out of the woods with the chain saw, which caused us to RUN, man. We ran.)
So apparently EVERYONE got lost after clue 7. And the few stops before that, people had been stealing the clues you were supposed to pick up, so we weren't even sure we'd been right up until then (although the directions made sense until that point). Either they'd written a bad story, or someone had altered something vital along the way so that we couldn't find a reference point. <.shrug> It was a lot of fun, until we got ourselves hopelessly lost. <.giggle>