seattle

I was gonna write this as a super detailed recount of what happened but it was turning into a 10,000 word essay no one would read. So I'm gonna shorten it up. Basically I went to Seattle this weekend to visit the city and go hiking. Saturday morning I went to go hike, ended up going to the wrong place because I trusted Google Map too much. I go up this tiny ass National Forest road for 15 minutes and realize I'm in the wrong place. Because most of the road is too narrow for two cars without falling off a cliff, I (mistakenly) think it's a one way road and look for another road down. I keep driving down shittier and shittier roads which phone map is taking me (now I know: don't trust phone maps in the mountains) and eventually get to really dangerous looking road. It doesn't look like somewhere I want to go but it's a complete dead end otherwise and if I go through it I get to a named road and can get the fuck out of there. I get a little ways down this road and realize oh shit: this turns from really bad road into hiking trail I'm absolutely not supposed to be driving on, especially not with a fuckin small car. It's downhill and narrow so I can't turn around, just hoping I can get through it to the road. Eventually it made a sudden dip and my car gets completely stuck. I'm stuck here without having seen a single other person the entire time I've been up here.
It takes me an hour and a half for to me to get a hold of a tow truck company that will come get my car due to 1) having no signal for minutes at a time in the middle of nowhere 2) being able to identify where I am so they can find me and 3) them willing to do it, because two places flat out said no, you are too far gone for us to come. An hour passes to where they call back and say they are at the start of the forest road and will be there soon. From then it was nearly two hours for them to find me. A lot of calls back and forth (when the signal worked) trying to figure it out because it was so mazy we couldn't communicate the same place. Eventually he texted me a picture of the map and said to just walk to him there, his truck wasn't making it any further. Two minutes after this, phone dies. Had 20% battery and just died. Still doesnt work, wont charge. Maybe from all the rain (itd be raining a lot of the time i've been stuck.) Good time for that to happen, when I'm in another state with a broken car. The way I eventually found him was him honking his horn and me yelling back to him. So I was up here stuck for close to 5 hours, extremely fortunate I even got found. He said a lot of the time one party or the other gives up because it's too hard to find people. Plus it was starting to storm really bad and it was unsafe. We'd have to come back tomorrow with a different truck to get the car.
He drops me back off at my hotel, its about 5PM. It's storming, I have no car, and I'm miserable and worried. So I don't even do anything, I watch TV for a while and then sleep on and off for 12 hours. Good day one of vacation.

Day two, he picks me up around 9:30. We go get his other truck, and then head back up there. It's around 11. When he actually sees where my car is he says it's gonna be a miracle if we get this car out of here. The process of getting it out back to the road took over 3 hours, from pulling it out of the dip, to getting it turned around with no space, to clearing out individual rocks it was gonna be unsafe to drive over, driving it up 50 feet, stopping and clearing more shit out, having him tow it up over something it was stuck on, repeat until we got it out. Front of the car got damaged and gonna have to explain this to insurance. Kinda glossing over just how ridiculous it was to get out, I'd have pictures if my phone wasn't broken. He leads me back down the forest road and I'm finally free at around 3PM. The bill (which he actually discounted me on): $985. More than my hotel, car, and flight combined. I'm gonna submit it as a claim on travel insurance and hope they'll cover it, I might just be fucked out of it though. I just want to relax now, this has been so stressful. Go find a bar, have a beer, watch football or some shit. However, as I'm driving away back towards the city, I get a massive migraine from all of this stress. I stop at Starbucks so I can use wifi and figure out what I'm gonna do, and from now until maybe 10PM (an hour before my flight) I'm puking every 10-15 minutes. I've only eaten a small breakfast both days, feel like complete shit. I'm trying to navigate back to the airport because I don't even want to do anything else anymore, and I'm getting constantly lost because I'm bad at finding my way around a confusing city, and I get a few exits and have to stop at a gas station and throw up again.
Get to the airport, show them the beat up car, and have to fill out a form that they'll get back to me later with to discuss it. I don't even get to resolve this shit now so I'm still just going to have to wait on them. Finally I'm in the airport, still throwing up a bunch, buy some shit to help settle my stomach, and it wasn't until maybe an hour before my flight that I felt like I wasn't going to die. Took overnight flight home, fortunately was able to sleep a couple hours, arrived at 6:00 A.M., and got myself back home and had to be at work at 8.

And that was my vacation :)
I kinda went skipped over some details so this wouldn't be impossibly long, but basically I'm extremely fortunate I was even found by the tow truck guy. I was really close to getting stranded in the mountains, walking 10+ miles back to the freeway (provided I went the right way) and having to tell rental company I lost their car. Tow truck guy said it was the least accessible car he'd ever towed in his 20 years of working. So yeah, moral of the story: always double check where you are going before you go somewhere. And don't do shit like this by yourself when you don't know what you are doing, because a second sane person would have obviously told me that there was no way that was a road.