Lord of the Castle

We turned into the driveway to see a house with no apparent entrance!

Two closed garage doors greeted me with a French door to the left. However that door has no access unless I wanted to walk alongside of the house, climb onto their side (?) porch, walk back and knock on it. I didn’t like that idea. To the right was a picket fence with a gate. Perfect!

As I got to the gate, I was greeted by a growling, barking dog! Now, in my experience, people who live this far removed from civilization probably want to be left alone…and this growling dog might just be tasked with enforcing that desire! I was not going to find out. My momma didn’t raise no fool!

I decided to call my daughter. NO RESPONSE.

Since no one is responding to the growling, barking dog, I assumed that I must have chosen a wrong fork two forks back. I mean, it didn’t LOOK like they were expecting me…

Dodgeball and I received a lovely massage as we drove down the driveway (which turned out to be the left side of the third fork) over to the road that leads to the retreat center. We didn’t see a house! Back out to the right side of the first fork…no house there either! I called my daughter again…NO RESPONSE.

So Dodgeball and I drove to the house “right next to the church.”

As soon as we reached the dirt part of the road, I found myself driving on a levee with a lake on both sides.

And this road is not ‘washboard’ bumpy. It was more like “washed out” bumpy. You know, “let me drive 5 miles an hour and HOPE I don’t wreck my suspension” bumpy. VERY slowly around the lake. Aha, here is the second fork!

But this wasn’t just a fork in the road. This was a fork with a high degree of difficulty. The right road had a sign directing us to a retreat center. The left fork had a sign saying: “Authorized Vehicles Only.” She didn’t tell me about this…

I guess I can always tell whoever comes to arrest me for trespassing that my daughter authorized me to go to the left so that I could pick her up at some house that might be somewhere on this road, I THINK!*#)!

Well, wouldn’t you know it. A previously undisclosed THIRD FORK! Unbelievable! I went to the right. Around the bend I in fact saw a house! All that separated me from this house was …

a field of mud! (It has rained quite a bit here in Missouri. You know, floods…)

I drove and hoped! We made it across without getting stuck. Thank God!

Realizing that I couldn’t change undo the dodge ball game, I refocused my attention on carrying out my plan and called my daughter to get directions to her location. This is what I heard: “Well, you make a right out of the church parking lot and then right on the second street. At the end it turns into a DIRT ROAD…and then there is a fork…and then there is another a fork…”

Rain clouds began forming very quickly in my brain. Before it got so dark that I couldn’t see anything, I asked “What am I looking for?”

“My friends house.”

Hey, that helps! I mean, I knew that I shouldn’t ask for an address on a dirt road with two forks in it. “WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? HOW WILL I KNOW THAT I AM THERE?”

“Dad, I don’t know. Just call me if you get lost. And its really bumpy”

Now, earlier in the day, when my daughter was deciding how and where she wanted to spend her afternoon, I had expressed that we had much to do and that she needed to be at a place where I could just drop in and pick her up. She had said, “I’m going to my friend’s house. They live right next to the church.”

“That sounds good. I’ll see you there.”