The Ditch

This was my first road trip and I was so excited. My friend Cassandra was coming with me and we were going to visit Michael at college and just have some fun! We were also going to meet Heather, his girlfriend. Cassandra and I left my house in the early afternoon, and the trip was supposed to take about 6 hours. We ran into quite a few problems along the way. We were lost many times during our trip and we stopped for directions a total of 9 times! Altogether it took us about 9 hours to get to Greenville. When I was only about 15 minutes away from the school I called Michael to get more directions. He wasn't quite sure where we were so he put his friend, Alex, on the phone. Alex told me that I was headed in the right direction and that I needed to make a right at the Sandy Flat gas station that was coming up very quickly. I followed his directions and took a right, and of course this wasn't the correct road. I went too far right!!! So I turned around and cut across the gas station because I needed to be on the road on the other side of the gas station. It was an older gas station, so I cut accross it, and slowed down because I saw a car coming down the road. I was just coasting a long, my foot not on the brake or the gas. I coasted right into an 8 foot ditch. I didn't even see it!!! My whole jeep was swallowed in the ditch. Cassandra was laughing the whole time, and I was scared to death that it was going to flip over on it's top. When I went into the ditch I screamed and was still on the phone with Alex. I told him that we were in a ditch and for him to call 911, then hung up. Michael tried calling me back, but I didn't answer. Some people came out to my car and told me to get out of the car. I told them that I wasn't going to move. One man, we'll just call him Bubba 1. Bubba 1 opened my car door, unbuckled my seat belt and pulled me out of my car. When I finally got out of my car and saw that my car was really really stuck, I started to cry. The people who worked at the gas station tried to console me by telling me that I was only the 5th person who had done that! Cassandra was still laughing at the fact that I just drove straight into a ditch, and she tried to comfort me. I told her what was on my mind and that I was terrified that something could have happened to both of us and I would have been responsible for it. After this we both cried, and Bubba 2 came up to me. He asked if I was ok, and I told him I was. He then told me that he had a truck and could pull me out of the ditch. He asked if he had my permission to try it, and I said in a scared, sad voice, "Just make it be ok." At this time Michael's car pulled up. He was driving and 2 of his friends came with him, Alex and Shawn. Michael made it to the gas station in 7 minutes!!! He said that they were playing Halo, but when he heard me scream, they shut the game off and came to our rescue. I didn't get up when I saw the car, and I just sat under the sign where I had been with Sander. Michael came over and asked if we were ok, and we said that we were fine. Michael just patted me on the head....at the time, I wasn't very happy with this greeting, but now we just joke about it. When I brought it up later, he mentioned to me that he couldn't have given me a big hug, because he had a girlfriend at the time. Bubba 1,2, and 3 all pulled my car out of the ditch, and surprisingly there was little to no damage on my car. The bottom of the passenger side was a little dented in, and my license plate broke off the front of my car. Other than that, my car was perfectly fine.
The rest of that weekend was pretty wonderful. That night, Michael took us downtown. We went to Coffee Underground and walked to the Falls Park. Sander and I stayed with one of Michael's friends, Ally. She was sooo sweet to us, and when we first met her, she asked me if Michael and I had ever dated, but I told her that we had just been friends for a long time. I was kinda disappointed that I couldn't meet his girlfriend that weekend. Apparently she ignored all of his phone calls, and was scared to meet me. She broke up with him over facebook that weekend while we were visiting.
When Sander and I drove back we took a different route with only three different roads. The whole youth group had already heard about my ditch experience, and I told the story multiple times that night at a Yak-N-Snack. Some of the leaders were also very curious about Michael's girlfriend, and I had to tell them that we never actually met her and that she broke up with him. I was blamed by some people at church for the breakup, but I didn't see it that way.

The Pond

My family did join Colonial, and I became actively involved in the youth group. During the summer of 2009, our youth group did a ministry tour. We went to 3 different churches, played hand bells, sang, and gave our testimonies. The trip was over a weekend, and on Saturday we stopped at an orphanage. There were only a few teenagers there, but we all had such a great time with them. It was almost like a miniature camp :-) We had a lot of free time there to play games and enjoy the outdoors. They had one paddle boat and a very small pond, and I really wanted to go on it. I asked Michael if he wanted to go on the paddle boat, and he said that he would go with me. I was the first one to get on the paddle boat, then Michael, Eddie, and Ryan. We started to sink into the water when the last person got on, so he jumped out. Michael and I were the ones in the front with the paddles, so we got a push off the side, and we started paddling. The problem was that the paddles weren't moving! It turned out that the rope that they used to tie us to the dock had gotten tangled into the paddles, and we couldn't go anywhere except in a circle. Eddie decided that he had enough of it, so he jumped out into the pond. This pond was quite dirty, and I had on a white t-shirt, so I was NOT about to jump out. Michael and I were just stuck in the pond together, so we just talked. This was really the first time that we had a conversation besides the "Hi, how are you doing?" "Good" conversation. I really enjoyed talking with Michael. I don't remember what we talked about while in the paddle boat, but I do remember thinking that he was a really nice guy, and fun to talk with! It was dinner time by now, and we were still stuck in the paddle boat, but everyone else went inside to get something to eat. We were eventually pulled back to the dock, so we could go get something to eat, but this was a fun thing to talk about for the rest of the trip. It was our first adventure. When we went inside, we were standing in line for food, and I distinctly remember that I turned around and started talking to him. He saw smoke coming from the kitchen, and said that maybe something was on fire, and I replied, "Um, I think that's just smoke coming from the boiling water." Then he made a comment about how when he was irrational, I was rational, and when I was irrational, he was rational. I thought about this for a long time. My main thought was "We compliment each other very well." On this trip, Michael and I also started reminding each other not to complain. I don't remember how it started, but I do remember that we said it to each other multiple times. To this day, we still tell each other not to complain. We both say that our pond adventure was pretty much the beginning of getting to know each other.

First Time Meeting

The first time we met was at Colonial Baptist Church, which is the church that we both attend in Virginia. Michael basically grew up in Colonial, but my family had just moved to Virginia from Charlotte, NC. We were visiting churches and one Wednesday night I went to the Youth Program downstairs. Apparently I was with a group of people, and someone introduced me to Michael. It was simply a "Hi, nice to meet you" sort of thing. Sadly, I do not remember this meeting, but Michael does remember! The only thoughts I know from him was that he thought I was very pretty. Because my family didn't join Colonial for a while, we did not see each other very much. I was put in Jean's Sunday School Class, and at this time I didn't know that Jean was Michael's mom. This was somewhere around the end of my 8th grade year, and beginning of my 9th grade year in 2003-2004.