Okies...
So my Uni requires community service as one part of its graduation requirements. One of the ways to get lots and lots of community service hours quickly is tutoring at a juvenile delinquent place. You even get a few credits too. You go, you help a couple of people, and you come back. Seems simple and for credits/hours, it sounds like win/win.
Would I go there alone? Heck no! So I go with a friend who also needs community service hours and she offers to drive. Two more people who also need hours come with us so all is well. We leave about 4-5ish and plan to be back around 10ish so nothing big or problematic. We didn't check the weather before but eh... how bad could it be?
We leave around the right time and settle in for a 45-60 minute drive just chatting. It's getting dark early so there's not exactly much around for scenery to talk about though. 10-15 minutes later, we realize we went right instead of left when we left town. Whoops. We are so totally late now. We pull a u-turn and go in the right direction. At this point we're going to be at least 20 minutes late so my friend is speeding a little bit.
Since no one has driven out this way before, we had no idea exactly what areas we would be driving through which while usually fun isn't always. We stumbled through a tiny town. From the welcome sign to the leaving sign, it's almost exactly 1 mile. It had a bar, a church, a gas station, and a few houses/small businesses from what I saw despite it being very dark by that time.
Then the blue lights appear in the rearview mirror and my friend who's driving starts worrying. She's never been pulled over before. It turns out that this little one mile town is a giant speed trap and my friend just got her first ticket. :( Okay, so now she has a speeding ticket from the land of nowhere and we're majorly late for this teaching thing.
We finally get there or at least we hope we're there because wherever we were was very creepy. We were in the right spot and had to be checked and all before going in. And we also had to explain why we were so late. Then after leaving the guard tower/post place we have to walk through the grounds to the place we would be teaching in. It's really dark, I mean like no stars dark, at this point. Seemed kind of strange but whatever.
The teaching stuff went on in a pretty large classroom with big tables. We all sat at a different table and had a couple students. It wasn't actually bad and a couple hours passed pretty quickly. Everything was good until we got on the road. It seemed that not checking the weather hadn't been a smart idea because now we had to get back to campus through a very very dense fog.
Okay, so no problem. We can only see the colors of the lines on the side of the road and maybe 20 feet in front of us but we start on our way back. Then suddenly realize we had yet again gone the wrong direction and turn around going back the right way.
So when I say you could only see the lines on the side of the road, I mean that's what you could see. You couldn't see signs on the side until you were practically on top of them. Needless to say we went really slowly. The only problem with not being able to see far in front of you really is that nothing else can see you until you're right on top of them. So there we were driving down this road with no other cars on the road for miles around (we thought) when suddenly something appears in the headlights.
There was a deer in the road. A giant deer. My friend stomps on the brakes as hard as she can but the fog was so thick that there wasn't much distance between us and the deer already. Thankfully the deer was faster than we were and ran off to the side. So there we were at a complete stop in the middle of a very foggy area now with animals roaming the road and all feeling slightly panicky. In hindsight, it's really really good thing there were no cars following us because if we didn't see the deer in time, there's no way they'd have seen us in time.
We made it home around 11-12ish after that but overall it was a pretty awful night for driving.
