My students know that I love a road trip. There is nothing quite like climbing into a church van and driving to a destination. So a few weeks back YMX decided to have a contest to find out “Who has the worst road trip story?”
It turned out that my NYWC buddy Chris Wyatt of South Carolina (and an adoptive parent newly back from Ethiopia) had the craziest story. This beats any road trip nightmare ever! Read the rest of the stories. If you like ironies, check out how Gospel.com avoided using the word “hell.”
Here’s the winner:
We’ll start with the fact that the last 20 miles of the trip took 2.5 hrs, driving over steep, curvy mountain roads in a whiteout. It snowed three feet in those two hrs. I was driving a loaded van, pulling a 10 ft. trailer, leading a caravan of several other vehicles. We couldn’t pull off of the road, and cars were going into ditches all around us. So, after 12 hrs of driving, we finally get to the lodge. We wake up the following morning to 18 degree temps and strong cross-winds. As we are walking to get the kids their skis, we start down a set of steps. One of our chaperones promptly falls on an icy step and breaks her ankle. Badly. I wrap my coat around her, and take off looking for ski patrol. We hook her up to a sled, and get her the infirmary. I then have to dig our van out of the snow (more than an hour), and go off the road twice driving to the infirmary. The nearest hospital with the facilities to help is almost two hours away over icy mountain roads. We FINALLY get to the hospital, and they tell us she needs surgery. They don’t have the facilites to do the surgery. So they put her in an air cast and send us back to the lodge. We get to the lodge and there are no wheelchairs, so we have to carry her to the room on a luggage rack. We get her settled in and drugged up, and my phone rings. It’s the ski patrol office. I have another girl with an injury, and one of my boys has been in a collision that required the other party in said collision to be airlifted out with a kidney injury (NOT my kid’s fault). So he’s been stuck in the patrol office all day, as he can only be released to his legal guardian (me for that trip…the other party tried to sue him for the wreck, and it went to court…our kid won). I take care of the injury, get the kid back on the slopes. The following day weather is so bad that no one can ski. Every kid at the place was holed up in the lodges. For a whole day. We start the trip back the following day. Our chaperone with the shattered ankle has never been in the mountains before this. She is doped up on painkillers. We are about 10 minutes into the trip when she suddently projectile vomits – right into the back of my wife’s head. There’s nowhere to stop for another 20 miles or so until we get to the bottom of the mountain. We finally stop, and I clean vomit up off of the van while my wife goes into the bathroom to try to clean the chunks out of her hair. Well, you know what happens when a van full of people has to smell vomit for hours. Everyone started chunking, and we had to stop every 30 minutes or so to empty out plastic bags full of barf. One of the vehicles broke down, another got lost from the caravan. It took us over 15 hrs to make what SHOULD have been an 8 hr. trip. On top of that, three kids ran out of money, and I had to foot their meals on the promise from their parents that I would be repaid on arrival. Did I ever see that cash? Nay.
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