My “Trip”

Margo and I are BFF’s so we were totally psyched when her parents offered me a trip to Mt.Shasta with them, but since it was the Orthodox Easter, my parents had to stay home. We drove for a while stopped for bathroom breaks and occasionally made fun of how her dad pronounced toilet. We got gum on the way and had some fun in the car, but were truly starving for the snow we were promised. We were going to sled, have snowball fights and all of that stuff. But when we got there things didn’t turn out so well.

We were going to stay with Margo’s parents’ acquaintance Sergei who they did not know so well. When we were about done driving it was around 5:00 PM. We had left at around noon. When we got there, there was no snow. It was scorching hot on the outskirts of a town called Shasta. We kept looking for the house, but it was nowhere to be seen. We called the man that owned the house. He had told us several different street addresses. Finally, when we were sick of driving around, we stopped and told him to meet us when we pulled over. Luckily, he was in his car and did not come out… at the time. He drove past us waving and turned. We got into the car (we were standing outside the car to take a stretch) and began to follow him. We turned at the same place that he turned until my friend’s mom (Sveta) noticed that he drove into a river and he was totally naked (Margo and I saw nothing THANK GOD!). We drove down into the banks. He had gotten into his car after a short “swim”. Her dad (Tolya) had started talking in Russian, so I had no idea of what he was saying. He said that we were going back after we got out of the banks of the river.
As we were driving back we stopped at a diner and had some food. I had found a brushier to “Mystery Trees”. This place had it’s own motel and we needed a place to stay. We started driving away. It was said to be around one hour away. We could not sleep in the car, it was freezing cold, and but it was dark. Tolya kept driving until we got to Oregon (We had started out in the Bay Area). We turned around and started heading back to some place were the motel was. Margo had kept asking were the motel was and how many more miles. By that time, the GPS had stopped working and we were lost. I had called my dad on Sveta’s phone (Mine was dead and would have no reception anyway). He said to get the GPS working again was to restart it. After we restarted it, it started to work and Tolya put in a short cut.
We then had just been driven into a forest. When we did, there was no concrete, no civilization. We were on a cliff, lost, in a van, with minor reception. We had driven for 30 minutes and by then we had hit two branches. We called my dad. Tolya had gotten out of the car, both Margo and I were panicking and I called my parents while we still had reception. He told us the plan, spoke to Sveta and luckily, we turned around. That was to my surprise, the road was so narrow and it was so dark. I had stopped panicking but Margo was wailing like there was no tomorrow. She was literally screaming so loud thay you could hear her from Jupiter and was scared out of her mind.

We drove for around another 30 minutes, and all that time Margo had just started to calm down. After around an hour, we got to the motel. When we woke up, we got to the car and went the whole way home, no stopping, only gas and emergency bathroom brakes. I will NEVER go on a trip with Margo AGIN IN MY LIFE unless it is maximum 2 miles away!
-Tamari Gurevich “My ‘Trip’”