Appalachia Part V: Thursday

I now arrive at the conclusion of the Appalachia Adventures series. Soon I will be able to move on to other topics.

On Thursday morning, according to custom, we got up at 6:00 AM. It took some of us quite a while to get going. We pranked one of the guys' vans in reaction to their pranks, but ours wasn't nearly as good as theirs. Since we didn't have much time to plan or gather materials, we (by which I merely mean two of my friends and nobody else) used what we had: feminine products.

At the work site our roofing plans were foiled again because it was raining again. I helped put in some more dead-wood and insulation and watched a few people work on the siding, but there was nothing else to be worked on in the rain. Ivan (one of the carpenters) did his best to find little odd jobs for me to do since he could see that I wasn't very happy about sitting around not helping, and I thought that was very sweet of him.

During one of the long periods of time in which we had nothing to do, Boone told the tale of the truck wreck. A semi full of coal was careening around a curve at about 80 mph - on a wet road, might I add. At the same time, another semi was coming around the bend. The coal truck swerved to avoid the other truck. It clipped the other semi and then collided with the mountainside. The other semi suffered some damage, but the driver was uninjured. The coal truck, on the other hand, didn't fare as well. The cab was completely crushed and rescue crews spent the entire day picking up pieces of the driver that had been scattered along the road. At least he would have died instantly. We drove through there only about five or ten minutes after the accident. If we had left our site exactly when we were scheduled to, we could have been part of that accident.

We bid our final farewells to the carpenters and left the site at lunch again that day to go back to the cabins and pack. Everybody was ready to leave on time, but we couldn't go until the woman in charge of the organization came by to check that we were cleaned up and give us our COAP (Christian Outreach to Appalachian People - the organization we worked with) shirts. She was running more than an hour late, but we got to leave eventually.

My van was almost empty because I chose to ride with the teacher that everyone else was fed up with. We listened to 80's music and enjoyed some gorgeous clouds all the way home. Upon arriving at school and finding my luggage just in time for the college group study, I was called and informed that I would be picked up by Josh. By this point, most of my female friends had heard about this Josh guy of whom I was (and am) rather fond, so they were pretty excited to hear that he would be picking me up and they would get to see him. When he arrived, three of them decided that they would each carry one of my belongings as an excuse to walk over to his car. Unfortunately, it did not even occur to me until much later that they were hoping to be introduced to him. I'm not very good at that sort of thing.

So there you have it, Princess Gwendolyn Maple's Appalachian Adventures in five unnecessarily lengthy episodes.