And boy did we get our adventure!

Yesterday, we decided we needed to take the truck on the beach in order to get building materials to our property. We didn’t even make it to the beach before we noticed a clicking coming from our rear driver’s side tire. After looking at it a bit and calling our dad’s, we took some weight off to see if that would help. It continued to click, so my dad suggested looking for a rock in the hubcap.

Lo-and-behold, when we took off the hub cap we realized that tire was loose too! Unfortunately, we’d taken the tire iron (Amazon) to camp to work on the 4 wheeler and forgotten to bring it back to the truck. Luckily, some people had come to the park and gave Kyle a ride back to their house to borrow theirs, and we tightened all the tires. Yup, the front was loose as well! After saying goodbye to them, we ran into another gentleman who owns a cabin in the area and he lent us his for the trip down the beach in case we needed to change a tire out there.

And then we were finally off!

Aaaaand…. We only made it about 3 miles before we hit one of the sinkholes that this beach is known for. One tire in mud and three on sand, pretty much the worst-case scenario for being stuck off-road.

As we dug out clay and mud more kept seeping in and we got well and truly stuck.

We sunk up to our axles and high centered the truck on a rock. Luckily it was still light out at 10 pm when we started digging. But we were working against a 21 foot tide that could potentially take out our truck. At midnight, after I started crying (I’m going to blame that on pregnancy hormones) we decided to leave the truck. We’d walk back to the 4 wheeler so we could at least go back to camp and feed the dogs. We were just hoping that the truck would not be to damaged by the tide. The plan was to come back in the morning to try again.

Just as we were getting ready to go, another cabin owner showed up! At midnight! With a big truck and all the tools needed to get us out!

Seeing that big light come down the beach felt like the best thing that had ever happened to us! The cabin owner spent another two hours digging and towing us out (we were really that stuck). Then he invited us to follow him back to his cabin just up the beach from us to spend the night. We followed exactly where he drove the entire time and didn’t get stuck again!

The next morning we unloaded the truck at our beach access and tried again. This time we made the entire 14 miles without getting stuck anywhere!

Whew! We also realized driving back that the hole we had dug ourselves out of was completely gone! The tide would have ruined our truck for sure. So we headed into town to get all the equipment we should have had the first time. Now we’ll be loading the truck and driving out again tonight. I think we learned quite a bit yesterday, and this time will be way better prepared!

Below are the items we purchased on the recommendation of our neighbor: