We were up at 3:45AM to have Jared and Tere at the airport my 5:00 for their flight to Miami. It was raining cats and dogs all the way there. We made it without difficulty in spite of the wet roads. We said our goodbyes to the kids. It was an emotional time for us. We really enjoyed our time with them and it was hard to say goodbye. There are tentative plans by Nathan & Valerie to come the DR in January at the end of our mission. So now we have something to look forward to again.
It was really raining hard when we left the airport. By the time we reached the “Autopista” (Freeway) Las Americas it looked like a hurricane had hit us! As we traveled back toward the city the water in the road got deeper and deeper. There were hundreds of cars on the “Autopista” and we were all slowed down to a crawl as the water level in the road got up to the doors. The water was about a foot and a half deep when our engine stalled. The freeway was now a lake with a parking lot worth of cars stalled in it.
I phoned for a tow truck but we sat in our Honda Odyssey Minivan for 3 hours waiting for rescue. All of that time I had the car in neutral and as each huge truck or bus would go past us the wall of water from their front bumper would push us further down the road toward dry asphalt. We were only about 50 yards short of our goal when two highway workers walked up in rain gear and pushed us by hand the rest of the way out of the water.
We were finally rescued but it took us 5 hours to get back to capital and back to work. This ordeal was another first for Hna. Johnson and I here in the Dominican Republic. But it all turned out OK in the end, we were towed back to Centro de Servicio where we turned in the Odyssey and got our old Toyota Corolla back. After lunch we were back to work in the mission office. It was a great week of vacation for us. We really enjoyed the visit of our son Jared and his wife Tere.
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