So, one winter my wife’s cousin John’s girlfriend Carmel (that’s a lot of words with no verb) talked several of us into renting a cabin in upstate New York for a weekend. (By that I mean actual upstate where Canada is closer than NYC, not NYC upstate which is anything north of the city limits.) We did some planning, and our trip to Northville was on our calendar.
We decided that Mary and I would leave a couple of hours earlier, since we were out of work sooner, and the balance of our friends would take two cars and meet us up there. Granted, this was before the days of Google maps, so we got the directions from the cabin’s owner.
Mary and I set out in our van, and soon realized that the directions were not all that great. There were three places that were especially unclear, and we had to guess which way to go. Lucky for us, we guessed right all three times and after 3 hours or so of evening driving we found ourselves at the driveway into a circle of homes.
Did I mention it had snowed?
Yeah, there was about two feet of snow on the ground, higher in drifts, and none of it had been shoveled or plowed in this area. So, at this point it’s dark out with no street lights, just the occasional front porch lighting, and two feet of snow on the ground.
And I can’t tell where the road is. So, guessing by the houses where the road probably is, I push into the snow and get a few feet before the buildup in front of my van stops me. I then get out, shovel the snow out of the way, get back in the van, and do it again. A few feet, shovel shovel shovel, a few feet…This goes on for quite a while – hours, I think. As we make our way slowly around the circle, I’m able to occasionally pick out a house number (the only way we can figure out which place is ours.)
Eventually we find the cabin, and I leave the van in the road in front of the place. We stagger through the snow into the cabin. I collapse onto a chair in the living room, while Mary visits the kitchen.
And almost slips on the ice. The ice covering the entire kitchen floor.
It’s then that we notice how cold the cabin is. She does a little investigating (I’m collapsed on the chair, with a heart rate about double what it should be) and finds a broken window. Apparently, somebody broke into the cabin at some point, and the open window froze the kitchen water pipes.
Mary busted up the ice on the floor so nobody would break their ass, and just then John arrives carrying their gear. They had taken their two cars, left an hour after us, and made all the wrong choices at those three places I mentioned. It ended up taking them almost twice as long to get there, but in their wisdom decided to leave their cars in the entrance way and followed my tracks to the cabin.
The cabin was completely frozen, even the toilet was a solid block of ice. There was a fireplace, but the wheelbarrow of wood was, for some reason, filled with water(?!?) so it took a while to get a fire started. There was a payphone, but it had a lock on it.
It was too late to try finding another place to sleep, and.. oh yeah…We had almost no food. I had some stew meat that would have gone bad while we were away, so I threw that and a couple of ingredients in a minicooler. We had planned to hit a supermarket up there…
Anyway, we eventually got a fire started and started working on dinner. As I mentioned, I had the stew meat and we found a large pot. There were some spices, and I had an onion I think. We melted snow for water, and made the lamest soup I ever ate. As bad as it was, though, everybody wanted seconds.
After dinner we had to figure out the sleeping arrangements. There were a couple of bedrooms, with fully-made beds in them. But, when we pulled back the covers, we found a bunch of dead flies in the beds. As if, the flies were cold so they crawled under the covers and died there. Ew.
It was not a comfortable night, nor was it warm.
The next morning we decided to pack it in and head home. We called the owner (after, somehow, the payphone lock mysteriously fell off) to apprise him of the situation. We then packed up our stuff and headed on out.
The drive home lasted a long time, but not nearly as long as Carmel kept hearing about the disaster that was Northville.