Off-Road Adventure

             It started out as a pleasant jaunt along Route 50 East to Maryland’s coastline on the Atlantic Ocean.  Our trip began at 6 am to give us plenty of time to bask in the sun of Ocean City and later frolic in the waves–perhaps spotting a few dolphins or whales romping in the surf. 

       We planned to stop in one of the boardwalk eateries for a little pizza and adult beverages before heading back to our bed and breakfast in quaint and quiet downtown Berlin.

           My girlfriend Jane and I didn’t count on a twisting and turning odyssey that would last well into the night and leave us hopelessly lost on a route not included on any map or accounted for on Google Maps.

           The highway supposedly ended at the OC Inlet parking lot. Because we had ventured on our trip as out-of-towners not at all familiar with the area we didn’t have any reason to believe the road would not go where our previously-reliable directional aids and that waitress at breakfast said they would.

          The 10-minute drive to the resort area seemed to run according to plan–that is until we approached the inlet parking lot. Suddenly, the road veered off to the right and had us heading not toward the Atlantic, but away from it.

       Our New England upbringing had taught us to keep following instructions given to us until our experience gave us a reason not to. Besides, our sense of curiosity told us to keep up with the exploratory expedition on which we now found ourselves.

      This proved exciting for the first half hour or so when the road started stretching and unfolding seemingly on its own. As the pavement kept reproducing itself like some type of home renovation show gone wild and darkness closed it it began to get far too creepy.

       Our hearts jumped into our throats even more quickly when we took a panicked look at our gas gauge and saw the needle heading more and more ominously toward empty.

      Of course, since we found ourselves on an uncharted, and probably unknown, stretch of road we hadn’t come near any place in which to stop and fill up.

     But, as if propelled by an invisible tornado, our car kept plowing forward instead of coming to the dead stop it should have some time ago.

     While I kept my eyes peeled for some sign of civilization besides the ever-ending and self-duplicating pavement unfolding ahead of us, Jane punched her smart phone for 911 in full panic mode. Even the emergency connection on the phone didn’t respond.

Nothing seemed to bring this joy ride from hell to a halt or even slow it down.

     The highway, strangely propelled by some otherworldly force, just kept laying down more asphalt across dirt and vegetation where cornfields had stood only a few minutes before. We couldn’t even steer off the road.

    It seemed like we had less and less control over our vehicle, its propulsion system or our surroundings as we continued to hurl forward at speeds topping 60 miles per hour.

      Our first night turned into another day, and another scary night rapidly approached as our blood pressures began to race at the same velocity as the indicator on our dashboard.

     We thought nothing would stop us from meeting our doom. Would this insanity never cease?

      Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, our car ride from hell began to slow and the road began to smooth out.

      Some strange force, probably as strange as that which had landed us in this wacko situation, eventually brought us to a dead stop as the road stopped propagating itself.

       A green light as bright as a Las Vegas strip nightclub billboard came blazing across our windshield and almost blinded us.

     The ugliest eight-foot creature I had ever seen emerged from the light and breathed an odor as foul as a backed up sewer line into the car. In what, at first, seemed like interplanetary gibberish, he indicated he had come down to Earth on an exploratory mission from a far away planet of the future seeking a place to colonize for his people, whose area had been destroyed in an intergalactic nuclear storm.

   "You understand me," the creature said, " because our people have universal translation abilities.  My advanced mental state also allows me to tap into your minds and gather everything about your civiIization I need to know to help my people to merge into earth as ordinary humans. I will transmit the information I gather back to my home planet and we will come down to take over your earth, with no one of your fellow humans knowing the difference. Of course, once we take over, you both will die."

      Then, without warning, the creature from another planet disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Before taking off, it put us into some type of deep sleep.

      After we awoke, Jane and I both struggled to get out of our car, but we found ourselves unable to move. Because we couldn’t contact anyone to release us, it looked like this road trip from hell could turn into the final road trip of our lives.

     After an hour of plotting ways to get out of what seemed like a life-ending situation, we found ourselves sitting alone in the dark, at least for the time being, although apparently we were no longer prisoners in a bizarre intergalactic plot. 

       We eventually found a way to free ourselves and quickly drive back toward Ocean City.

      Poof! Turns out our overactive imaginations had invented an entire misadventure that never happened. Aliens had not really appeared to us and the road had not mysteriously expanded. 

      We imagined the whole scenario, because, along the way, we had stopped in Ocean City for lunch and some locally-brewed craft beer. The last few hours had merely been booze-induced dreams--or should I say nightmares?

     After we woke up we returned to our condo to sleep off our strange adventure.