driving

My son had a little more than a day off between sessions of the sleepaway camp where he is a junior counselor, and so rather than drive 3 hours each way back and forth we stayed in Aiken. I took my bike down there and had a nice bike ride this morning, then went to buy a 25 lb. basket of peaches, then we packed up the car and headed to the camp.

I was going to take a fairly straightforward route to the camp, but using a road I hadn't taken this visit. I forgot it jogs going out of town, and I realized after driving a while that I wasn't on the right road and had ended up much too far south. So I headed north again and was pleased to see Wire Road, which is the road the camp is on. The trouble was, I started following Wire Road and after a while we came to a Y and neither of the roads going forward was labeled as Wire Road. I thought maybe the sign was turned or confusing and so I kept going on what I thought was the same road, but after following it a long ways through open country with no place to stop and ask directions, I finally decided it must be wrong and turned back. After going a long ways back we came to a tiny convenience store at an intersection and they gave me directions....to the wrong camp. I thought we might be on the right road but I wasn't sure which way to go on that road. I asked a boy outside his house and he told me to go left (and said he wasn't sure). The way he suggested was towards town and I decided that was the safer direction. Looking at the map we would have gotten to the camp by going right, but it would have been another 5 miles or so of nothing and I don't think I would have had that much confidence. I was in tears of frustration. I didn't have the camp phone number to call and ask directions from the other camp, and I couldn't reach my husband to have him look it up for me on the internet. So we drove much of the way back to town until we met up with a road labeled as taking us to the interstate, from which I could find the camp. We were an hour late--what was supposed to be a half hour drive took an hour and a half.

Driving home after that and after dropping my son off, the mural in Saluda NC struck me as tragic:


(click on the picture for a larger version)