Adventure gone wrong...

To plan out an adventure is half of the fun. You do all your research, make plans, get excited, pack accordingly and start your venture to only find out your adventure has other plans for you. Does anybody else feel this way? Maybe it is just our luck, but our plans never play out to our expectations. Granted, we probably set our expectations sky high but hey when you're passionate about something you go above and beyond. This last camping trip with our Pak was definitely one of those kind of trips gone wrong, but we made the most of it!

When we plan a trip, we like to plan out our hikes and explorations as well. We like to have an idea of where we're heading before heading to an unfamiliar area, especially not knowing if service will be available. It's good to plan ahead and is a must for camping. As much as one prepares for something, sometimes things just go wrong and you just have to go with it. In this case, we had hopes to wake up early from our camp site to head straight to the popular trails to beat all the day crowds. Well we woke up early, loaded up the Pak in the car and as soon as we were buckled up ready to pull out....our car decided it wasn't ready to wake up just yet. Talk about a nightmare come true!

Oh what a wonderful start of a trip we had. This trip was to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. We planned a two night stay at a campground located in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. We arrived on a Sunday evening, made camp jambalaya + s'mores and just enjoyed each others company, talking all night, pups by our sides, listening to the river nearby flow. It was a peaceful, cold summer night under the pines for the books.

Waking up to birds chirping, sounds of the river and sunshine we woke up feeling refreshed and ready for our big day. It was all fun + games up until this point. Looking at Garitt with a "please tell me you're joking" face as our car choked and struggled to attempt to start up, we couldn't help but laugh and say this cannot be happening. Our car battery was dead without showing any signs prior to dying, it just caved and said "nope, not today". We had to quickly figure out a new game plan of what we needed to do in order to get things back on track. So what do we do? We hoped it was a fluke with the colder weather and decided to go back to sleep in hopes we would wake up from this bad dream with slightly warmer weather and a working car. How adult of us right?

We got about another hour of sleep until we were restless and ready to figure out a solution to our hopefully not big problem. Garitt decides to give the car another try but only to get nothing but the "engine" light flashing this time. Great...engine failure at a campground an hour and half from home, our minds were thinking the worst was yet to come. Our spirits were crushed and we realized it was crunch time, time to face reality. We had a few options we came up with to try to figure out what to do, one being going down to the camp host's site and seeing if they had jumper cables + car to help out. We walked to the camp host's site to find out they were at another campground and wouldn't be back for a little while. Glorious! We had no service with the nearest store closed and the nearest trails 15 miles + from where we were, things were getting intense to say the least. Lol! The irony in all of this is that we have jumper cables. We just happened to take them out when packing up the dogs leaving them behind at our house...brilliant.

Game plan two..let's find some nice campers to see if anyone might can help us out here. First campers we came across told us they would think about if they had cables or not as they drove off in their Mercedes Benz Camper Van....fail. We continued to walk through our campground and stopped at our neighbor's site to ask for cables and hopefully a jump start to get us going. They were kind enough to lend us their cables that thankfully they even had, but did not think to see if we needed another car to help jump it. So we had one problem solved, we found jumper cables, now we just needed a car to jump us! Where to find another car.....

While we waited, we contemplated on going ahead calling it quits and packing things up to have them ready to leave a night early when our car came back alive. Just about the time we were deciding to do so, a car with a sweet, elderly couple came to our rescue. We flagged them down and explained our troubles and they were so very kind enough to give us a jump start. Luckily our car cranked with no other issues and our new dear friends, Larry + Sue, told us where they were staying just in case we were to have anymore troubles. With that in our minds, we decided to drive straight to our nearest Home Depot and grab a jump starter for a little peace of mind just in case it were to happen again. We ended up coming back and reliving another night camping, not letting the bad ruin our good time planned.

Even though things didn't go how we planned, we still had a wonderful time spent in the woods. Plus we got to see three waterfalls and a lava field in one day, how can you complain about that?! Sometimes life is funny that way. You just have to go with whatever life throws at you and give it your best back. You'll be surprised with the adventure that ends up coming out of the failures; sometimes they make for the best ones.

If you made it this far, thank you for following along!! Here are more a few photos from our adventure "gone wrong".

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Stay wild Pak friends!

Peace + Love

xx,

The Pak