A Lenspiration Adventure: How Rubber Floor Mats Saved The Day

by | Jan 18, 2025 | Stories & Expeditions | 0 comments

If you’ve been following along with what we’ve been doing here at Lenspiration, you’ll know that this month’s photo assignment is “Scenic Seasonal Paths” and that I went to go take pictures for it on the spur of the moment because snowflakes were accounted as gold dust in Connecticut at the beginning of this year.

Well, after our trip up north, I came home to West Virginia. And guess what? The opportunities for photographing a scenic path in a winter setting have piled up in excess of abundance, thanks to a particular weather system that everyone has been talking about!

Never one to miss out on a fantastic photographic opportunity, I bundled the family up on a wonderfully snowy afternoon and headed off into the falling snow to capture a perfect, wintery photograph of a path.

And this is all fine and good when you have a fancy vehicle like a Subaru Outback. But life has changed and my mode of transportation is different these days. But only slightly different. So I still carefully adventure in a Toyota Sienna as if it was the best method of exploring that existed!

But it is true that front-wheel drive just isn’t the same as all-wheel-drive, no matter how much I want it to be in my head. So I am learning how to approach things in a more careful manner. And this is why a box of GoTreads are always stored in the back of the van!

That is, except when I know I will not need them, like on a road trip this past summer when the van was packed to the hilt, and there was no room for such fancies. They were then stored in a special place at home where they could be easily accessed when we returned from our trip.

Unless I forget, of course, to put them back in the van. But that would never happen to me, right?

Well, that’s what I thought, until at the end of our wonderful little photography hike along the North Bend Rail Trail, I found myself unable to extricate the van from the spot in which I had parked it beside the road. How GoTreads would truly have been appreciated in that moment!

By the time I realized that my not-so-strategic parking spot was not that strategic, it was no longer afternoon, but rather, that time of day when things are getting dark, and a cold blue sky suggests to everyone that a long, icy night awaits those who are unfortunate enough to not be at home in their warm cozy beds.

Try as I would to go forward or to go backward, the snow proved to be too deep, too volumous, for the slight decline in which I had happened to get ourselves into.

It is then that one is very thankful to God for providing a helper in life (ie. a wife) who not only is willing to go on adventures despite the possibility of troublesome hazards, but who also holds the delightful ability to think outside the box in such a way as to overcome or avoid them. If only I was endowed with such capacities!

With no GoTreads to help, with the inability to move the van in any direction, and with spinning tires and the smell of smoke our only reward for buffeting the gas pedal, two words from Julianna sent a ray of hope into our unfortunate situation.

“Floor mats!”

Well, that’s an idea I hadn’t thought of. They were the tough, rubber type. Let’s give them a try!

And indeed, progressing inch by inch, we backed up the 10 feet necessary to say goodbye to the gloomy wilderness and return to the snow-plowed bliss of civilization.

Another Lenspiration adventure had come to a fortunate conclusion.

If one is permitted to let their mind liken God’s laws to rubber floor mats, we might see how our little adventure is a tangible illustration of this particular verse in Psalm 119, “Unless Thy law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine affliction.” Let us therefore never forget His precepts, for it is with them that He causes us to revive (Psalm 119:92-93)!

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