Day 3: The roads we travel home
It's funny how quickly the weather can change. One day it's a perfectly sunny cloudless sky, then the next it's bucketing down with rain and you're fending for yourself with nothing more than a large flimsy piece of plastic they label an 'emergency poncho'.
We got rained out of our New Years camping trip. Many other campers on the site understood the warning signs much earlier and fled before it got bad. But I guess a group of optimistic Aucklanders who had travelled too long to turn around too so soon were hopeful for the better.
Too bad it didn't get better.
By 11am that morning we evacuated on a narrow gravel road, as the beautiful beach I had spent the past two days watching became an unforgiving force of wave and tide. Nothing was calm anymore.
The same could be said of the gravel roads we delicately travelled on. The roads were almost too narrow for two cars to cross each other in good weather. The added risk of rain and wind only had me holding my breath even more.
That 4 hour trip home became 6 hours long and I had never seen so many serious accidents in one day. I sat almost speechless and wide eyed as we passed by a rubbish truck that had rolled down the side of the cliff, a serious car crash that closed off State Highway 2, and even 5 minutes from home as a little Toyota rolled over the edge and into the heavy bushland below.
It wasn't 24 hours into 2016 and already there were three different incidents that were changing people's lives.
We as people may come from different backgrounds, but everyone is treated equally at the hands of Mother Nature. Often I forget this when I pass by an accident, thinking they must be some irresponsible driver behind the wheel. But I forget, not everyone is like that. We all take the same roads with the same purpose - to make our destination.
Be safe these holidays. Be thankful for every safe journey home.
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For the month of January 2016, I'm writing 31 personal stories about things in my life I'm thankful for. See all my posts during my month of thankfulness here.
