Leads to Blackness…
Hubby and I went to dinner at the neighbours Saturday night. The couple with the 4 kids I mentioned in Homestead Halloween. We had such a great time, and the food was simply awesome (and I am STILL waiting for the recipe for the marinated pork tenderloin kebabs they served – outstanding) as well as the company.
Living up here in the north away from the city has lots of great advantages….but it has one slight disadvantage when it comes to nightfall, when the moon is non-existent or obscured by clouds.
It is friggin DARK when the sun goes down. I am not talking about the orange-glow tinged darkness of city streets. I mean, so dark, you think you were swallowed up by a blue whale and sent to the depths of the ocean. So dark your eyes are straining to see and it gives you a headache. So dark you can’t see 2 feet in front of you.
As we said our goodnights and thanks for a great evening, Jason offers up a flashlight for the walk back to our place. Hubby says nope, we should be good, but thanks anyway.
HA…we get to the end of their driveway and turn left onto the road to head to our place….or what we THOUGHT was the road….
As we are walking, hubby has my one hand in his, literally, it was so dark I couldn’t see him standing next to me. My other hand was stretched out in front of me, palm open outwards…warding off the tree I was sure was going to jump out in front of me. We go about 20 feet or so, and I don’t feel the gravel under my feet anymore, we are walking on grass…where the heck are we? Obviously not on the road anymore.
We stop and look back at the huge, steel shed that holds the boats from the cottage camp in winter, it has a light on the one corner and it casts a thin beam onto the road directly underneath. We look forward, nothing but blackness, we glance back again, trying to get our bearings…the road HAS to be right here….
We start walking forward again, then suddenly, a fence looms in front of us, we almost walk into the darn thing, that is how dark it is…damn, it is the fence for the other neighbour across the road, his driveway forks off to the right of the road.
This is what it looks like in daylight:
Ok…we are doofus’s…we had ended up walking across the other side of the road and took the fork to the right instead of staying left on the main road.
This is what we almost walked into:
Doofus’s….. we backtrack in the darkness, straining to see the dozen or so logs that we know are piled between the neighbours driveway and the road. Jason had them delivered and was in the process of cutting them up for firewood. We didn’t want to cut across that section, trip and faceplant straight into a bunch of logs.
We backtrack to the road and turn right, again, I can feel the gravel under my feet so I know we are actually on it this time. We head up the gradual slope to the top of the little hill, and then start heading down, our place is the first driveway on the left from the top of the hill, but we still can’t see a blessed thing.
We get to our driveway and are cursing ourselves we didn’t leave the outside light on (that is due to the energy police being constantly on patrol), but we are extremely thankful that the neighbours on the other side always have their place lit up like a Christmas tree. I could at least see the cars at the top of the driveway, and from there, our dim solar lights along the walkway to the cottage.
We walk up our driveway, laughing at ourselves for being the total goofs we apparently are and for not walking face-first into a pine tree. From now on, one of us will ALWAYS carry a small flashlight with us.
Sometimes you just have to learn things the hard way…