evan, lindsay, nina, elena and esther

As I was uploading these images I thought how it would be fun to leave it to the reader to decide how they fit together and what was the whole story behind them. Or I thought of making a mad lib style post with captions for each picture with fill in the blanks. It could be like this:


Nina was all dressed and ready for a ____ (adj) day of _____ (verb ending in ing). Her mom ____(past tense verb) on the living floor _____(ing verb) the moment.


Her _____ (adj) eyes sparkled with _____(feeling) catching the light ____(verb) into the basement apartment.


When without a warning, something changed! Nina decided she was not _______ (adj) about leaving to go ______(verb ending in ing) after all. Something about the way her ______(pl noun) fit was _____(verb ing) her. Her little clenched ______(pl noun) stuck to her sides and her once sparkling _____(pl nouns) formed narrow ______(pl noun).

You get the idea. haahaaaa Here are the rest of the pictures we took that day.







And here's what actually happened:

10:30 I (Lindsay) rent two pair snowshoes and 1 pair gaters. (hestitant to spend $26, we usually keep our entertainment budget down to like $10 a month, truly. Unless we're traveling somewhere)

11:00 Nina dons the tights. Then we're on the road for a day of snowshoeing!

11:30 Feeling adventerous we decide en route where we'll trek - Harriman State Park, near Mesa Falls, or Big Springs in Island Park. We choose the latter, Melissa having recommended it the day before.

1:00 We take the turn onto what is called "Big Springs Ave" (I've been to big springs many o summer during family reunions at island park), following the sign pointing down that road saying "to Big Springs". We notice the road is not very well plowed, heavy snow and a beautiful sight. Well, is there another road? Probably not.

1:30 The road conditions suddenly worsen as we descend from the tree shadowed road onto a huge open sunny meadow with snowmobiling tracks on either side of the road. 50 yards into the meadow, and just as Lindsay says "Do you think we might get stuck?" the car locks its own tires up and we slide a few feet into deeper soft snow.

2:00 The towels we found in the trunk are not helping us get unstuck. We bundle Nina up, put on our snowshoes and start hiking to find help. A passing snowmobiler tells us we will probably only get out with a cat. A cat! We find a promising construction site.

2:45 Nice construction workers attempt to pull us out with their trusty bobcat (pictured above). Before they can reach us they too are stuck.

3:30 They are unstuck with the help of a huge tractor from said construction site.

4:30 Evan arrives via snowmobile (thank you nice snowmobiler!) two miles down the road at the gas station to call a better-equipped tow truck. A deputy is the first to inform Evan that we have broken the law, driving on snowmobile-only terrain. He lets us go without the $800 fine and 90 days in jail. Turns out we were supposed to have taken the Big Springs LOOP Road (parallel to the one we took, and fully groomed)

5:00 The towing bobcat (bob cat number two) gets stuck in the meadow before it can pull us out. It pulls itself and then us out. I drive with napping Nina to the tow truck guy's place, read Jane Eyre in the car while Evan and other tow truck guy fills in the hazardous holes left in the meadow.

6:00 Evan arrives to the shop and we are charged $880 with a hasty explanation of services. We only have enough to pay half of the amount. Paul the tow truck man takes our video camera AND digital SLR as collateral (apparently the first wasn't enough) threatening mercilessly to impound us if we make him wait any longer. We drive back. Evan misses his 6:00 class.




It kind of felt like we were led into a trap, ya know? No warning signs or ANY signs marking a snowmobile only road. WELL, it wasn't all doom and gloom. Treking in the snow was fun! We stole a few pictures before our camera was stolen from us. It was a BEAUTIFUL and memorable day. As I'm sure my mom would say "The stupids strike again" (any of you familiar with the kids book series The Stupids ? ongoing family joke). The story has a happier ending. I went back to Paul's on yesterday to pay our debt and collect our belongings. Turns out that other people have complained to the city about Paul's iffy tow trucking business practices, just this weekend as well. He has no competition for like 30 miles. (we did find out that about $300 of our bill was completely unjustified) I fought the amount and he shaved off $180 from the total. So that made the total $700. Luckily our insurance is reimbursing us $500 of it. $226 for a 4 hour snowshoeing trip? To think I had been worried about spending $26!!! We're hoping that since the city of Island Park now knows our story that they'll put up signs marking the road as it should be to warn unknowing and less snow-savvy people.