My exciting trip to Oshkosh started before I even left my house. My parents are the club directors, so we had to drive the bus and the van to the church so the club could load up.
It was about 4:30 on Saturday afternoon when we were preparing to leave our house, my mom realized that she had forgotten her sunglasses. Then I had to go get my jacket and my pillow, so when we finally left our house it was more like 5 o ‘clock. On the way to the church, the bus’s battery light came on. The bus, which my mom was driving, (my dad was driving the church’s twelve passenger van) had just been in the shop but they had not been able to check all of it before we left, so we just had to hope that nothing bad happened before we got back to Florida in a week, we had no such luck.
We got to the church and got on the road. I road in the van and fell asleep, so when the bus broke down I was completely clueless. I was told later that there was “A popping sound from the front” (Rudi Russell) of our bus and so they pulled into a McDonalds. This was at about 10 at night. We called a 24 hour mechanic and before they got there the McDonalds closed so we had to move to the gas station next door. When the mechanic got there, they discovered that the turbo had broken so the bus could only go “about 50 mph and that was really pushing it”(Joe Vital).
Since we had no other choice we continued driving for about two and a half hours until we reached the Jacksonville Spanish SDA Church. We had called them back at McDonalds but I still felt bad because the guy had to wake up at about 3 in the morning to let us in. We stayed in their sanctuary, but the poor staff had to wake up early to go and rent four minivans to make up for the bus.
By nine on Sunday morning we were on the road again. The rest of the trip was uneventful and Sunday night we stayed at the Hinsdale Filipino SDA Church. They fed us breakfast and then we were off. We stopped in Chicago and went to a park to kill some time. Then we headed to Oshkosh. We got there at around 6 pm and nearly got lost trying to find camp.
We were very glad when we got to camp although the staff were very tired because they were either driving or navigating. I am sure that we all hope that we have a very boring trip home.
