In 2007, Grandma and Grandpa Tueller were serving a senior mission in Nauvoo, Illinois. At the time, Gordon and Margaret were assigned to serve at the Carthage Jail Visitors' Center in Carthage, Illinois. They lived in a house near the visitors' center that was big enough for our family to stay with them.
We decided to visit them during the Christmas holiday. We stayed home in College Station for Christmas Day, then planned to leave on December 26 and return home on December 31.
The drive from College Station, Texas, to Carthage, Illinois, was about 900 miles and roughly 14 hours. We decided to make the entire trip in one long day.
Tate was only 18 months old, and Annette was pregnant with Addison. We loaded the suitcases into the van the night before. The next morning, we got everyone up early and were on the road around 5:30 a.m. We left the kids in their pajamas so they could sleep for the first few hours of the trip.
About three hours into the drive, the kids were starting to wake up, and everyone needed a rest stop. We saw a Love's Travel Stop as we were leaving a small town and decided to stop. We filled the van with gas, the kids changed out of their pajamas and into their clothes, and everyone went to the bathroom.
Once everyone was back in the van, Annette started handing out bagels with cream cheese and cups of yogurt for breakfast. I got back on the highway, and we continued our trip.
About 20 minutes later, we were approaching a major intersection when I saw another Love's Travel Stop. It looked awfully familiar.
As we got closer, I realized it was the same Love's where we had stopped about half an hour earlier.
I said something like, "Is that the same Love's where we stopped?"
We pulled over to the side of the road. Annette and I got out the Rand McNally road atlas we kept in the van. We did not have a GPS in those days, and we did not have smartphones giving us directions. We used a paper map.
As we looked at the map and tried to figure out where we were, we discovered that the town was Carthage, Texas.
We also discovered that Carthage, Texas, has a highway loop around the city. Apparently, when I left the Love's, I got on the highway going the wrong way and ended up driving around the loop, right back to where we had started.
When I was writing this story, I used Google Maps to measure the route around the loop. We drove about 20 miles without actually getting anywhere.
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| Map of Carthage, Texas, showing the highway loop we accidentally drove around. |
Annette and I laughed about it. I do not remember whether the kids even realized we had just driven them in a big circle.
We figured out which direction we needed to go and continued on our way.
About an hour later, we ran into another problem.
We were still driving through rural East Texas. The two-lane highway was lined with tall pine trees, so we could not see very far ahead. We came to a railroad crossing where the warning lights were flashing, the bell was clanging, and the wooden crossing gate was lowered across the road.
There was one car stopped at the gate in front of us. We pulled up behind it and waited.
Because the trees were so dense, we could not see far enough down the railroad tracks to tell whether a train was coming. The kids were watching a movie and were happy, so we sat there and waited for the train.
Nothing happened.
After about 20 minutes, the guy in the car in front of us got out and started looking around. By then, there were two or three cars behind us and three or four cars stopped on the other side of the tracks.
I got out of the van and walked up to talk to him. We talked briefly and agreed that neither of us could see or hear a train coming.
We walked over to the crossing gate and lifted it. We could not find a way to keep it up. I leaned on the weighted end of the gate while the other guy lifted the wooden arm until we got it all the way up.
I held the gate while he went back to his car and drove across the tracks. Then I waved for Annette to drive our van across.
I continued holding the gate and waved the other cars behind us through. Then I waved the cars waiting on the other side through in the opposite direction.
Once everyone was across, I let go of the gate, and it lowered back down across the road. I got back in the van, and we continued on our way to Carthage, Illinois.
We had left College Station at 5:30 that morning, hoping to make good time on a 900-mile drive. Instead, during the first few hours of the trip, we managed to drive 20 miles in a circle around Carthage, Texas, and then spend another 20 minutes sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train that never came.
Fortunately, the kids had movies to watch and seemed mostly oblivious to our adventures in the front seats.
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