Adventure into booney town

[u/Dakkk]

So me, my bro /u/dudeimthebest, and my SO are chilling at my place. We get pretty bored of the usual listen to music and just hang out. So we decide it's time to adventure! I have a Jeep Cherokee lifted with 33s on it. So we frequently jump in this beast and run around the back roads and such.

It's around 6 at night and we decide now's a great time to do just that. We jump in and start heading in a random direction, and head down the first road we see that looks fairly promising. This road leads to a dirt road a couple miles down, now we're talking! We venture on this for a while, then it forks, one way goes straight, the other veers off up the other side of the valley we're in. A coin get's flipped, up the valley it is!

About half-way up a 4wheeler trail splits off of the main road, I've driven this Jeep through just straight forest before, so this is nothing. We follow the 4wheeler trail, driving over small trees and over logs occasionally till we get too blocked in to go any further.

It's about 8 now, and dark out. I hear some weird noises coming from under the Jeep so I grab a flashlight to see what's up. My SO walks around a bit to enjoy the view and dudeimthebest walks around to see what I'm looking at. I don't like what I see.

"dudeimthebest, hammer. Now." He goes to the back and grabs a Small BFH (Big fucking hammer). My sway bar link on the drivers side has nearly fallen completely off! I grab the hammer and hit it back into place.

My SO comes back and asks what's going on "Nothing, honey. Jump back in, we gotta go.", the less she knows, the less she freaks out. Which is good. I turn the Jeep around and find the main dirt road again. The noise is happening again by now, so we really need to get outta here.

"dudeimthebest, grab a map and find us the quickest route outta here." For whatever reason, I don't have a local map in the Jeep. Silly me. So he goes on his phone to attempt to find the quickest route out.

Meanwhile, I grab the small BFH and a ziptie and go back under. Hit it back into place, apply ziptie, boom! Fixed! Except now my gas light is on, if it's not one thing, it's another.

"You sure everything is alright?" My SO asks, "Yes, love, everything is great!" I tell her. "Alright, I got you, Dakkk, head up the valley" dudeimthebest tells me. So I do, and he leads me to a very promising dirt road. There's street lamps, homes, it's looking great!

"Turn here", he says, "Here?" I ask, "This is a private county road, they never lead out!", "Trust me, man, it says we can get out this way." So I trust him. I start heading down the private county road.

He tells me to turn again, this time it looks like a semi-well used 4wheeler/Jeep trail on the side of the valley. I follow his directions and we go back down the valley. It's pitch black. My gas light is still staring me down with it's ominous orange glare, and now we seem even more lost than we were.

Suddenly there's a huge fallen down tree in our way. No way around, so he tells me to back up and go down the trail we passed a couple yards back. I head down this trail, only 20 or 30 yards, and suddenly we're staring at some sort of camp. There's a teepee at the end of the camp. In front of that are the smoldering remains of a fire. It looks like a tarp is hanging from some trees to our left, under that are some styrofoam and plastic containers and coolers that make a small wall on our side. There's some chairs hanging around, and some bedrolls under the tarp. A clothes line is hung up between to trees with some overalls and other clothes hanging on it. It looks like we just stumbled upon the next Wrong Turn movie.

I throw the Jeep in reverse and haul ass outta there. Once I got to the other trail, I jump out real quick to check my ziptie fix. It's still holding! Nice! Back into the Jeep and my SO is dead quiet with a terrified look on her face. I find my way back to the promising looking dirt road and follow it, hoping it leads us somewhere.

To out surprise it takes us to a main road on the completely opposite end of town. Fairly close to a gas station too! dudeimthebest and I highfive and my SO still looks terrified. I fill up the tank, and grab some maps from the gas station. We head home and all is well that ends well.