Midge Turns onto the Wrong Freeway

On the way back from a day trip to spend the second night in the same motel, an idea I was against from the start. (I wanted to check out so we'd have the option of staying near where ever we ended the day.) Midge took a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a hilly desert area, climbing up into some mountain. She woke me by nearly driving into oncoming traffic to avoid the cliffs on our side of the road. Finally I got her to pull over into a wide spot so I could drive. I opened the door, and we were only a couple of inches from the edge. I told her to just get into the back from her side and climbed over into the driver's seat without getting out of the car. I gently rolled us back onto the road and started looking for a place to turn us around and head back. Midge was complaining that we would have to drive the rest of the night to go back that way. I pointed out that I didn't have any idea what, if anything, connected to the north of us, as our map did not go this far south. I drove a few more miles until we found an exit. I took the exit and it turned out to be one that didn't have an on ramp headed in the opposite direction. I headed up into the hills towards what was supposed to be a town. There were no lights, and no traffic. After about 10 minutes of winding narrow road, Midge started to get nervous. "What if there's nothing in this direction, what if it is just a ghost town, abandoned, there's lots of them around here." After a couple more minutes of that conversation I decided we could turn back and continue on our original path. I told her I didn't think we'd find a connector north until we were out of the mountains on the other side, and then we would have to cross them again to get back to wherever our hotel was. We didn't have a cell phone, and we didn't have a map that showed anything but the route from the hotel out to the mining town we'd gone to visit. "Keep an eye out for a rest stop with telephones." I was hoping we could call the hotel and someone there would be able to look at a map and tell us where we were, and how to get back there, or at least find us a place to stay for the night until we could get back tomorrow to pick up our luggage. "Just think of it as an adventure." I kept telling Midge. I think the adventure had worn off when we'd been unable to find anyplace to stop for dinner and had finished off the Fritos and M&M's instead. We were also down to two half liter bottles of water. A rest stop would be a good thing. I passed a sign that said 16 miles to the summit. I figured there would be a rest stop near the top so knew we'd be able to refill the water bottles and there would probably be a junk machine, and maybe even a map and phones.
At least I was doing a better job of keeping our Prius on the road in her own lane, except when I had to dodge the fallen rocks in the road. Midge moved back over behind me, she didn't like looking over the edge of the cliff on the passenger side. There seemed to be a lot of missing guard rails, missing, or the road was so little used there were none. I was betting on the latter, as many of the state road markers were so rusted out you couldn't read the route information, and there were sections of the road that didn't look like they'd been resurfaced in years. In many places the castor bean plants and creosote were overhanging the road, or growing from the cracks in the roadway, making me think there wasn't really much traffic of any sort. We'd only seen about 4 vehicles since nightfall, about one an hour. Three of those were 4 wheelers with a couple of hunters each in a convoy, the other had been a beat up pickup camper. Midge had taken a corner tight and we'd nearly collided, fortunately they'd seen our lights and had honked before starting around the corner, so Midge had jerked back into our lane before they lumbered around the bend. Their light (only the far one was working, and there were no running lights) was pointed into the brushy hillside, nearly invisible.