River Trip Gone Wrong
(Names have been changed due to privacy)
I hope everyone had a great 4th of July! I am still in Independence Day mode and wasn’t really thrilled about getting up this morning to go to work. I’d rather take a little vacation to recover from all the festivities. I definitely wouldn’t mind another trip to the river at Twin Palms Resort where, four summers ago, I had the time of my life with some of my really close friends. But one particular incident turned a fun-filled weekend into a quite shocking experience.
It was a very warm weekend in late June when two good guy friends of mine and I left one Friday morning to take on the four hour drive from Orange County to Blythe. We were all in great spirit and just looking forward to hop on the boat and be out on the water. I even got to drive the boat myself that day, which definitely was an awesome experience, even though I lost my hat somewhere in the river waters. That wasn’t the only thing the river took from us: as of today, we counted several losses of cell phones and sunglasses to the water.
That same night, four of my other good friends made their way out to meet us at the resort for the weekend. All of them arrived in a great mood and ready for a barbecue and fun games. We stayed up late playing truth or dare and adult Jenga while enjoying some chilled drinks. The first night went super smooth and didn’t give any indication of what was about to happen the following day.
On Saturday, all seven of us spent the day together on the river island, playing Volleyball and interacting with other vacationers a-k-a “river rats” (which is the prestigious title people are being called after a certain amount of river visits). I was far from being a “river rat”, but I had a hell of a good time anyway. Later that day, we all went back to the house to get ready for yet another great dinner. We decided that evening to do the same as the night before and stay on our patio to play games. We were having a blast doing the usual shenanigans when one of our friends, Luke, wanted to go inside the house to get another beer.
The front door was a big glass sliding door, which we usually kept shut so that no insects were able to fly inside the house. Luke wasn’t aware that the door was closed and walked against the window, making it shake quite hard. To his defense, it was sometimes really challenging to notice since it was pure glass which made it seem that the door was actually open. After the first few seconds of being in shock, we all started laughing and blamed it on the alcohol. Thanks God nothing worse happened. Luke then successfully opened the door, got his beer, and then joined us again at the table.
Unfortunately, the second time around things didn’t end that well. After continuing our games for a while, Luke decided to get himself another drink, again unaware that the glass door had been closed. He moved in full swing and hit the door way harder this time, which resulted in the glass being shattered all over the poor guy. We were all in shock. Luke didn’t move one single bit while the glass pieces rained down on him.
Once we all realized what just happened, everyone jumped off the table to help. Luke had suffered some serious cuts, and blood was running down on the floor. We made him sit down while a couple of my other friends started to clean up the broken pieces of glass. My friend Dan immediately called 9-1-1, but since we were far off from civilization, we decided to drive ahead to meet the ambulance on the way.
Breanna, Dan, Luke and I hopped in the car and headed out while the others were still working on cleaning up the mess. We were about ten minutes out when we saw the ambulance approaching us in the middle of nowhere. Breanna gave headlight signals to demonstrate that we were the ones who had requested the emergency, and the ambulance as well as ourselves pulled over on the side of the road.
So there we were, in the middle of the night in the nowhere, standing at the side of the road while our friend Luke was being taken care of by the doctors. We knew he was in shock, but when he asked us to take a photo of him being vetted by the medical professionals, we all just shook our heads and thought, “seriously dude?!” Of course we did not take a picture of this scenario. Once he was all bandaged up, we proceeded to the next hospital where Luke would get stitches, as recommended by the doctors.
We arrived back at the resort at around 5 a.m. Needless to say, all of us were overly tired and shaken from the events that happened that night. We caught a little bit of sleep before we needed to figure out how to temporarily fix the door and deal with the insurance. Yeah, this second trip unfortunately didn’t turn out at all as we had hoped. Thanks to the help of everybody though we made sure that nothing worse happened besides some scars and broken pieces of glass. This could have ended way worse, which we were all aware of. From that incident on, there was always a sign on the new glass door, indicating that it was closed so that something like this would not happen again.
Image: ©Anne-Kathrin Schulte
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Anne-Kathrin Schulte, is a contributor for CaliforniaGermans.com. She writes on her personal experience of the American Dream as well as on working as an au pair in CA. She was born and grew up in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she completed her degree as a state-approved Kindergarten teacher. After her au pair engagement in the US and a quick return to Germany she decided to attend university in California and moved back to the United States. She has been living in Southern California since 2011.
If you would like to contact Anne-Kathrin, please send an email to californiagermans(at)gmail.com and place her name in the subject line.
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