That Tim Allen is Full of it Man

(Yep. Dumb and Dumber reference.) We had plans this weekend. BIG plans.

Karley, Karyn, and I had plans to set out on Friday after class for Hudsonville, Michigan and see the beautiful Liz VanDrunen herself. Then on Saturday we were going to watch Trinity's track team rock the house at a meet at Grand Valley State University. And THEN we were going to watch Calvin's air band lip sync competition with one of my faves, Ann Marie, with the possibility of seeing my other high school friends later that night. Well. All of those plans and dreams kind of crashed and burned. Due to storms and snow Friday night, we decided to leave early Saturday morning (Write this down...I woke up at 5:45 for that!). We left with high hopes of Pure Michigan from all those Tim Allen commercials. He's the tool guy, after all. You should be able to trust him, right?!

We were going along, singing Taylor Swift, minding our own business, when suddenly, about halfway there,  this is what our drive looked like:

Bear in mind, we are three lame college girls who aren't very useful in most emergency situations. We turned Taylor down to a 3 on the volume knob (that's when you know it's getting serious), stared silently ahead for outlines of the road and other objects, and kept cheerfully (but nervously) telling Karley (who was driving) that we can totally figure this one out.

This is the first time in my life I've been happy to be stuck behind a semi truck because those were the only vehicles we could actually see through all that lake effect snow. We inched along at 0 miles per hour (I know it sounds impossible according to the laws of physics, but that's what happened. Just telling you the facts.), past countless cautionary tales that ended up in the ditch on either side of the highway and even seeing an accident happen a few hundred feet in front of us. Finally, after 3 miles and 30 minutes, we took the next exit, happily into the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel. How fortunate, we thought. Now THERE is a place in which we could spend all day! (That was a joke. Kind of.)

Karley beat the game! 

Their great candy selection. So colorful! 

As you can see, whilst in Cracker Barrel we had breakfast, played old Amish games, and looked at their beautiful selection of delicious candy. The other thing we did was call our trusty sources for advice. I called my brother Rudi, who looked up the weather (huge warning telling people to only travel in emergencies) and told me that turning around would be a good idea. We got the same advice from Karley's dad, my uncle, who is a truck driver himself and familiar with this stretch of driving in the winter. So we borrowed a shovel from the nice Cracker Barrel Candy Lady, shoveled our way out of our parking spot, got super brave, and headed back home, thus ditching our friends, our exciting plans, and all that colorful candy.

Shoveled out and ready to go.

Karley and Karyn

The cousins, ready to turn around for home again.

Back in Palos, catching a flick. 

And there we were at 1:15 in the afternoon, weekend plans kind of down the drain, but laughing due to the series of events that brought us back to Palos Heights 6 hours after we left it. It's funny though, because while you would think that we were in a terrible mood, going through that together was one of those odd bonding experiences. Like living in South Hall with no air conditioning in August as a freshman in college. I now know I can survive a snowpocalypse. Look, Dad, I'm building character! To salvage what was left of our free day, we decided to go see The Vow in the nearest movie theater to catch a matinee. (Sorry everyone, I thought it was awful.) It turned out to be a great weekend anyway. In the last 24 hours I've lived and learned one thing: Tim Allen is not to be trusted.