The next morning the sky looked threatening, but we started out for Jamestown, one hundred miles away. All went well until noon, when a gentle drizzle set in, and we put up the top, stopped under a big tree, had our lunch, and waited until the supposed shower was over. Farther west it had poured; we noticed that the cars coming in were covered with mud, and concluded that they had come over country roads. Surely not the National Parks Highway! So down went the top, and off we started in a _wet_ atmosphere, but not really raining. The chains had not been disturbed since they were comfortably stowed away on leaving New York. One man advised us to put them on, but with a superior don’t-believe-we-will-need-them air we left our tree shelter. He called out after us, “Say, strangers, you don’t know what you all are getting into.” We didn’t, but we jolly soon found out! In ten minutes we had met gumbo, and were sliding, swirling, floundering about in a sea of mud! I will try to describe it. A perfectly solid (apparently) clay road can become as soft as melted butter in an hour. Try to picture a narrow road, with deep ditches, and just one track of ruts, covered with flypaper, vaseline, wet soap, molasses candy (hot and underdone), mire, and any other soft, sticky, slippery, hellish mess that could be mixed--and even that would not be gumbo! “Thank God for the ruts!” we devoutedly exclaimed. If you once got out of the ruts, your car acted as if it were drunk. It slid, zigzagged, slithered, first headed for one ditch, and then slewed across the road. It acted as if bewitched. We had passed several cars abandoned in the ditch, and those ahead of us, even with chains on, were doing a new version of a fox trot. The road grew worse, the mire deeper. The ruts were now so deep that we just crawled along, and, to prevent getting stalled, we pulled out of them. In a shorter time than it takes to write it, our left front wheel was down in the ditch and the car lying across the road, and stuck fast. That was all that prevented us from being ditched. There we were, unable to move. We had not tried to walk in gumbo. That was an added experience. All three of us got out to see what _could_ be done. It would be impossible to jack the car up there and put on the chains; the jack would have sunk out of sight. And no car could pass us. Your feet stuck in the gumbo so that when you pulled up one foot a mass of mire as large as a market-basket stuck to it, or your shoe came off, and you frantically slid and floundered around until you got it on again. We thought of a dozen clever things to do, _if_ we could only have walked. There was a farmhouse half a mile ahead where no doubt we could have hired a team to pull us out. But how could we get there? My sympathies are all with the fly caught on sticky flypaper! In a short time, a Dodge car came up back of us, a man driving it, with his wife, his son, a boy of fifteen, and a small girl.