"Where are we?" "I don't know."

So this weekend I accompanied Landon to Nebraska for a friend's wedding and for Open Road (a men's a capella group from Bethel that Landon is in) to sing at the church there. We left in the middle of the day Saturday and I brought some coffee cubes in milk along for the ride. It was about a three hour drive, so we got there, changed and went to the wedding. We stayed with the sister of a friend from school for the night, so that was really nice of them to let us crash there.

Today we went to church in the morning at Bethesda Mennonite in Henderson, Nebraska to listen to Open Road sing for the last time this school year. Afterwards, Kellen's parents (one of the seniors in Open Road) treated the group (plus ladies) to lunch in York, which is a bigger town just about ten minutes away from Henderson. We all stuffed our faces with delicious food. It was an all you can eat buffet, which no one ever leaves while they're still comfortable.

After lunch we headed back on the interstate towards Newton. Landon got bored of interstates partway home and decided to drive off and explore some random small towns along the way. Neither of us were in a hurry and it was a pretty part of Kansas so it was a fun detour. There were even a couple moments when we crested hills and found some awesome views. We stopped got out for a little while. The weather was perfect as well so it just made it amazing.

Sometimes I don't know what to do with my arms.

I sat on the roof for a bit. It was pleasant.

Eventually we decide that since I've never been to the Flint Hills of Kansas before, and neither of us had things to do this evening, that we would drive in that general direction and explore. Great idea, right?! Since Landon is actually from Kansas he looked up a map on his fancy shmancy iPhone and figured out some general direction for us to head. So off we went on back roads, over big lakes that I didn't know existed, and by many many wheat fields.

Landon found a turtle on the road. He was overjoyed. Except... really. The guy loves animals. 

Anyways, we got.. somewhere. I don't even know where we were, but we were over an hour away from Newton and we got a flat tire. Fun. We weren't too freaked cause we discovered a spare in the trunk.. until we discovered that it too was entirely flat. Landon tried to call his parents... with no luck. We really didn't know where to go from there. A man who lived at a house really nearby to where we were stranded came riding out on a four wheeler with a tank of gas to see what the problem was. He said that they had an air compressor back at their house and took our flat spare to go try and pump it up. We knew the regular tire was out of the question because it had an actual hole in the side of it. Eventually the man comes back with our spare, but also bad news. The air valve was broken, so it couldn't actually hold any air. Right about now though is when Landon's parents called back. They live about an hour away from where we were, but they also had a bunch of tires so they set out to bring us one.

It was quite flat.

So we had about a two hour wait for them to get there. We walked down the road a ways to have multiple nice people ask if we were alright. We also found a dead vulture and got stalked by cows. It wasn't too bad. It was also a beautiful evening, so no complaining there. I just found the situation hilarious because it seemed everything was going wrong, but neither of us really had things we were needing to do, so it was fine. Otherwise it probably would have been a different story. I guess forced quality time is still quality time :)

Only a few minutes before his parents showed up we got a visit from a police man seeing if we were alright. He decided to hang out with us till Landon's parents arrived... which was just a little awkward but whatever.

They finally came to our rescue with an extra tire so we stuck it on there and were on our way. It was 8 by then for a grand total of three hours, so we stopped at Freddy's on the way home for (veggie for me) burgers and frozen custard.

I finally ended up back home around 11, a bit later than the original 3 or 4 we would have expected coming straight back from Nebraska. Oh well, it turned out to be even more of an adventure than we had originally intended. Even on the ride back home we were able to laugh about it, so all in all it wasn't too scarring of an experience.

Moral of the story, when making spur of the moment decisions, don't make assumptions about the condition of your spare tire