LOST – Not Reality, Actuality…

About 9 years ago at our worry-free pre-kids days, my husband and I went camping with a group of about 10 friends. We rented a tiny island at one of the rivers in Maine. The island can fit 3-4 tents and the rest are just trees (and of course some deer, snakes, wildlife, a wood made portable toilet and all-you-can-drink river water). The campground owner dropped us off with his motorboat and then left. No cell phone signal there. The only way we could reach him or any other human beings was to roll our canoe for 2 hours downstream to his office. That meant it might take us 4 hours or more to roll back upstream, so we never bothered.

On the second day, we fine campers decided to paddle our canoes for fun. It was a cloudy day and some waves were kicking in. Before long, one of our friends’ canoe flipped, then Joey (my man) and I came to the rescue. While we were on the rescue mission, the waves got bigger. After made sure our wet friends were fine, Joey and I rolled our way back. Only to find out that no matter how hard we paddled toward our campsite, we were farther away from it. Not only that, the wind blew us out from the shoreline and into the middle of the river. We kept rolling with all our strength, and then finally Joey said, “Don’t fight with Mother Nature.” We let the wind blow us downstream, and Joey guided our canoe back to the shore.

We landed in our neighborhood island, meaning that there was no way we could walk back to our campsite, but we decided to go search for other human beings. Joey led the way, cut down tree branches and moved aside tall plants so I could go across. Finally, half an hour of hiking in the wild wood later, we found another group of campers. They let us rest on their bench. Joey and I stared at the river worried about the friends we just rescued. Two hours later, they showed up walking toward us. Their canoe got blew a lot farther downstream than ours. We all sighed with relieve and happily to be together again.

When the sky became clear a few hours later, our newly-met local camper paddled us back to our campsite with her canoe. She said she wanted to warn us when she saw us paddle the canoes out that morning. "This river could drown people in this weather." she said. Well, how did we know. We were just city people tried to escape from cell phones and Internet for a few days.

There were three things I learned from this lesson:
(1) Don’t fight with Mother Nature.
(2) Chicks dig guys who have survival skills.
(3) Always bring chocolate covered coffee beans in your pocket. Cause you don’t know when you would get stuck in a place for many hours without food and coffee.