We were supposed to leave early, getting away by noon, giving us the whole afternoon to settle in. An urgent call for Dan put us well behind schedule, as we had to wait for him to go into the office and get back. The ladies decided to get a small head start on the drinking, polishing off a blender of Margarita’s, but Jack and I stuck to a single light beer. Riding a motorcycle drunk was not the wisest of moves. Eventually we got things together and we left our place a little late, but still managed to get on the road by 4:00pm. We would deal with a little traffic, and then should have smooth sailing. We should even be able to stop for dinner. I thought we should have enough daylight, with the sun setting around 8:00pm.
Emphasis on should.
We were making great time, and decided to stop to eat at a local diner that was a favorite of Robin’s family, with a good sized crowd. According to Dan, we were less than 10 miles from the turnoff, where our progress would necessarily slow. We settled in for some good home-cooking, and after polishing off dinner and desert, figured we had maybe an hour of sunlight left. After paying the ridiculously reasonable bill, and picking up a bag of ice, we headed out to finish our trip. As we climbed onto our rides, I heard Dan scream out “God DAMN it!”
Turning to look at him, it didn’t take 10 seconds to see his problem. His brand new, $250 saddlebag was missing off his bike. Along with it, a third of our gear.
We had a quick huddle, and looked up at the darkening sky. It looked like clouds were rolling in just to make our day that much better. It was decided to quickly head to the cabin, and re-inventory there. We could pop out the next day to replace whatever we’d lost. The missing gear did give us an open place to strap down the ice bag.
We were about 5 minutes down the gravel road when the skies opened up. Soon we were all soaked, but there was no place reasonable to stop, and with just a few miles left, we decided to gut it out. We continued through the darkening evening, and hit the dirt road, with only about 2 miles to go. Of course, God in his infinite good humor thought it would be funny to hit us with one of those real downpours, until we were crawling along at about 10 miles an hour, slipping and sliding through the mud and slick grass, branches reaching out to swat us from the side, and making our little journey Hell on Earth. We were slowly advancing with Dan in the front, since he was most familiar with the unmarked road, followed by Jack, with Sheri and me in the rear getting splattered with their mud.
It was great to see the cabin show up in Dan’s headlights. It had gotten as dark as midnight, with the setting sun and pounding storm. We quickly parked in the carport, and stripped our gear off the bikes. Dan wandered behind the building and managed to get the Honda generator running, giving us lights.
The doors were padlocked and windows shuttered to keep out intruders. While Dan was unlocking the side door, we were all complaining about our rotten luck.