John and I were on the second leg of our journey, the part where we leave Pendleton on Saturday morning and head toward the family mushroom spot. We have 2 options: The highway, or part highway/part dirt road. We choose the latter. When we got to the end of the highway portion, the dirt road looked pretty muddy. We began to turn around to take the highway route. John says "well it looks better once we get around the corner..." (If you are thinking, OH GOD NO, you are right) We take off through the mud and slip and slide our way down the hill and around the corner and when we are done.... the road does not get better. I have not taken a breath since the first slide and am my hands are clenched in my lap in fear when I hear John say in a low voice "that was a bad decision." oh shit. We were on a road of clay mud, which compacts around your tires and allows the steering to be merely a suggestion. The car would slide sideways toward the ditch, spin sideways in the road and hills and corners were simply heart-stopping. John actually had to get out and remove the mud because it was packed so high. We slowly and unsurely made it through about 5 miles of it when the road finally cleared up and I simultaneously thanked John for driving us to safety and cursed him for getting us there in the first place. We stopped to grab a much needed road beer as we drove the few miles to our final destination. As we were regaining our thoughts and feeling in our legs we came to a Y in the road. One side, the short route. John ran ahead to check it out and it looked like what we had just escaped. The other side was the long way, but the road looked better. Long way, it is! We were going smoothly for a couple miles when it started to get muddy again and we maneuvered our way around a corner and then the road stretched out in front of us. It was miles of mud bog. I literally felt my heart sink in my chest. We knew we couldn't make it. So, John very slowly backed us out of the half mile of muck around the big corner. We were siding sideways perpendicular to the wheel paths. He kept it towards his side because if we got stuck there it was a little ditch. My side? a lake. We made it to a place where the road hardened a bit and he made about a 20 point turn to spin us around and get our of there. We had no choice by to take the first Y we looked at and went for it. Luckily, this section was only bad for a mile or 2 and then we found ourselves back on real ground. It wasn't a life or death situation, but my goodness, was it scary. We were very nearly stranded out in the literal middle of nowhere. We would have had to walk at least 5 miles before we could have found a person or to the top of the hills to hope for coverage enough to get a hold of someone on our phones. And then we would have had to convince someone to battle those roads and pull out our rental car. I was so scared that I didn't even take any pictures of this event for fear I'd jinx it. and you know I take pictures of everything. Here are the remnants of mud from our treacherous adventure after being washed clean by rain and snow. More on that to follow.
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