Wednesday, 20 May 2015

I got up early this morning and got in a nice walk. It was warm but pleasant out.

In the early morning, I went to the vet to buy more food for the cats.

For lunch, I went to Buddha Burgers.

In the evening, 3 WIZO people came for a shiva call: Norman and Angela and Carol. It was very nice of them, and Angela even baked a cake that we all enjoyed.

Tomorrow, I return back to work, and I hope that that will actually help me begin to feel a bit more normal again.

Today story is about a time when David saved the day even though he was blind:

Stories about David: Getting Unstuck from the Gravel in Nakhal Paran

Often when I had time, David would want to get out of the house, so we’d go for a drive. We used to do this even before moving to Israel, and we certainly did it many times here, both when we lived in Tsfat and since we moved to Eilat.

On the 29th of September 2012 (I checked my blog to get the date and remind me of the details of the story), we decided to do such a drive. In this case, I chose to drive on the gravel road down Nakhal Paran (a dry river a little more than an hour’s drive north of here). We started from highway 40, and I hoped we’d be able to go all the way through to highway 90.

These roads are mostly passable to normal cars like ours, but parts of them can be quite rough or sandy or gravelly, and then one really needs a 4-wheel-drive vehicle with higher clearance. Eventually, we did come to some areas with pretty deep loose gravel and barely made it through. A little later, though, the road descended into the stream bed fairly abruptly, and I feared that we might not make it back up that incline if we had to turn around later, so we turned around there.

Unfortunately, when we got back to one of the areas with deep gravel, I didn’t approach fast enough, and we got stuck! The front wheels were in so deep that the bottom of the car was down to the gravel. It was at this point that David, although he was blind at the time, saved the day. He suggested using the floor mats from the car immediately in front of and behind the drive wheels (the front ones, in this case). It took a try or two, but it eventually worked, and we managed to avoid getting stuck again.

After that experience, I was a little more wary of going on these gravel roads. Getting stuck in the middle of the desert on a fairly warm day is NOT a very good idea!