A Texas tradition

Spicewood, Texas.
Population 5,527

Not a place where you would usually find me. But there I was, sitting poolside on Saturday afternoon, enjoying a couple of nice, cold beers and watching the sun lazily venture toward the horizon. A friend of mine was having a BBQ housewarming gathering at his new place out in the Texas Hill Country. The weather was beautiful and the pool and hot tub were just fantastic.

We stayed up late, swapping manly stories, and made plans to make waffles in the morning. As the night wore on, each of our crowd started to make their way to their bedrooms. (It's a big, beautiful house out in the country). I curled up in my room and quickly fell asleep.

I was awakened just after 9:30am to my host coming into the room, wondering where her husband and another friend were. Cuz they weren't in the house, and a car was gone.

"Fuck," I said. "Well, when I went to bed around 3am they had started talking about going mudding," I had to tell her. So now my mind starts working. The party started around 3pm Saturday afternoon. We were drinking, casually, all day. By 3am Sunday morning, I know I was in no condition to drive, which was why we all were staying the night. And yet, these two f*ckheads thought it was a good idea to head out into the countryside and go muddin.

Oh, and they'd left their mobile phones at the house, so we couldn't call them.

I start picturing the Ford Explorer rolled over in a ditch, them layed up in the hospital. Or them sitting in the jail cell of the small town, backwater sheriff's office.

So, just as the rest of us party-goers are dressed and out the door to wander down to the river to see if maybe they had just driven down there to drink and ended up curling up all Brokeback style in the back, we get a phone call. I overhear "We did a really stupid thing."

They decided to go muddin, as we thought, and wound up with a flat tire on some rundown dirt road and were unable to change it. Without their phones, they were unable to call us. And so they slept in the truck, got up at daybreak, and then walked about 5 miles to the closest gas station.

To say they looked like hell when our host brought them back to the house is an understatement.