What was supposed to be a two-hour drive turned into a 12-hour marathon for David Jones, who wasn't going to let anything stop him from getting to his daughter's wedding.
Not even a hurricane.
Jones was all set to make the drive from South Carolina to Johnson City, Tennessee to walk his daughter down the aisle, but found the roads were shut down to damage from Hurricane Helene.
It took Jones' initial attempt seven hours by car, before a state trooper in Tennessee told him around 2am that the roads were all closed. Estimating that he had about 30 miles left in his journey, Jones decided to walk.
He then set out on the five and a half hour walk to the venue for his daughter's wedding at 11.
Jones found the roads to be quite awful. He told WJHL, "It just… it's awful. And I can tell you a lot about the mud and the debris fields where I have to climb six, seven-foot-tall piles of debris of old fences and huge trees and it was just a tangled mess and dead-end roads and all kinds of things."
22 miles into his walk, a passerby who miraculously worked with Jones previously gave him a lift for the final eight miles.
Jones made it to his daughter's wedding on time, who had no idea the lengths her father went to the make it to her wedding.
She said, "That's so emotionally moving [to know] that my dad loves me that much, that he'll come and go through all of that to get to my wedding and be there on time."
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