Unplanned and Unplugged: A Tale of Misadventure & Connection

I use my blog to express views on timely global issues, but I also use it as a space for personal reflection on what makes me feel connected to nature and overall ALIVE. The entry below is a story I've submitted for a second blogging competition and details a massive misadventure that has become one of the most memorable to-date:

The first time I met Sandrena was for a morning coffee, and the second time I met Sandrena was for a road trip. I think that everyone should try road tripping with a stranger at least once, pending the stranger is not a creep, which Sandrena was not. With hours of tunes, rose-colored glasses, and a serious lack of planning, Sandrena, my sister Dana, and I hit the highway to for a chick-trip to Big Sur. Big Sur is off-the-grid, and camping there requires a booking months in advance (something we had not arranged). Instead, we bought iron-on sea otter patches at the ranger station and sweet-talked the ranger into giving us the inside scoop on secret campsites. "Go down the road. Keep going. And then turn, and go up the hill. And just keeeeeeep going... you'll see a plot of land on the right. If you leave now, you should make it there by sunset," he said. We lost cell service 20 minutes later, and the hood of our car went up in smoke an hour after that. Stranded on the side of the road with no way to communicate, we stress-ate our last bag of chips, which seemed logical at the time but in hindsight could have been our last supper. But as the sun began to set, we were met with unexpected good fortune: a Tarzan look-alike in a sports-car. After flagging down our new roadside assistant, Tarzan (Tristan) diagnosed blown coolant hoses and macgyvered a set of clamps from zip-ties to nurse our car down the hill. Tristan, Matt 1 (a drone videographer) and Matt 2 (a body painter) proceeded to invite us to camp with them. They, too, were strangers on a road-trip and had met online only a few hours prior. They claimed to be recreating a scene from Avatar by painting Tristan blue and filming him rock climbing using a drone. On so many levels, the story was suspicious, so the girls pow-wowed in the car to consider our options. We came to the cautious decision that a serial killer would have spun a more enticing story than body painting himself blue, plus he fixed our car and it was dark, so what other choice did we have? Three became six. Thirty minutes later and safely down the hill, we found out that the geniuses that invited us to their campsite had also not reserved a campsite. We tried to mooch spots from paying campers in one campground, only to be chased off the site, and in a final act of desperation, we sent Tristan into the woods. Somehow, it worked. Christine and Matt 3, a lovely couple in their 50s, offered us a plot next to their airstream. They were on a weekend getaway for their anniversary, and somehow found it in their hearts to take us in like six stray dogs. We gathered around their roaring campfire and made friends quickly. Matt 3 poured us campfire cocktails, and we connected-- truly connected. I can still hear Fleetwood Mac's 'Sara' through the portable speakers, still taste the aperitif, still make out the shadows of Matt and Christine slow dancing in the darkness. I can still feel the warmth of the fire, a celebration of strangers and our serendipitous rendezvous. Our eight paths had tangled into a hairball adventure, and here we were with no cell connection: a motley crew of misfits. I went against my grain at every turn of this adventure. I road tripped with a stranger, accepted help from Tarzan, believed in Tarzan and the Matts, drank my first aperitif, and trusted in the universe. Most of all, I felt more alive than ever.