In the summer following my senior year of high school, my group of friends decided that we wanted to take a “senior trip.” We wanted to go to California, or New York maybe. But since all of us were poor almost-college kids with thousands of dollars of student debt to look forward to, we settled on the town of Leavenworth, Washington, which is a cute little German tourist town about two hours from my hometown.

If you’re familiar with the highways in northwest Washington, you know that to get to Leavenworth from Seattle, you basically just get on Interstate 2 and drive until you get there.

I was not aware of this fact, and like many people nowadays, I relied wholeheartedly on Apple Maps to get me where I needed to go.

I was driving a van of five girls, and about halfway there, Siri told me to turn onto a dirt road on the side of the highway. I thought that this direction was strange, and I’d heard before that Apple Maps had a few bugs, but it hadn’t given me any trouble before personally, so I decided to trust my phone.

I turned onto the narrow dirt road. There were trees surrounding both sides of the path and giant rocks embedded in the path. It didn’t look like a road that was leading anywhere good. The directions said that the next turn was in 11 miles. Immediately, we were skeptical. Some of the girls in the car advocated for turning around, although the path was so narrow I wasn’t sure I could, and some were excited for an adventure and encouraged me to plow forward. I decided to just keep going, thinking that the road would turn onto a highway any minute.

But it didn't. Twenty minutes later, and the small dirt road had turned into a mountain path, going upward, with a giant cliff on our left and groves of trees stretching as far as we could see. There were giant patches of snow and no signs in sight, and our phones had lost service. We joked about it at first, taking Snapchat videos and nervously laughing about our misdirection. At this point, my phone still had the directions loaded despite not having service, so we knew how far we had to go and there was an end in sight. We were a little nervous, but not to the point where we were seriously concerned.

We passed a pretty waterfall and stopped to take pictures, figuring that while we were up there we might as well enjoy it. But then when we got back in the car, my phone had died and taken the directions along with it. We didn’t have a clue from then on how much longer we had to drive, and the mood grew somber. One of my friends started hyperventilating in the backseat and no one spoke for a good 30 minutes. I stared straight at the road ahead, hoping that I would catch a glimpse of a sign or concrete or a building or something. I could see the headlines already: "FIVE GIRLS GO MISSING IN THE MOUNTAINS."

Finally, we saw a cabin, then a bit further the path became more like concrete than mountain rocks. We had made it back into civilization. Later we found out that we had driven through the entirety of Wenatchee National Park in an hour-and-a-half-long detour.

I remembered this story this past week when I had to tell a story in my communications class, and it got me thinking about adventuring and getting lost. If I wanted to be cheesy, I could say that this story is a metaphor for life and that sometimes we take detours, but we eventually make it back, and we learn from them (like I learned to not trust Apple Maps).

But sometimes stupid choices make good stories.

(Also, I apologize to my parents because I never told them the full story from this day. Oops, here it is now!)