A Tennessee father walked nearly 30 miles and traveled for hours through dangerous hurricane conditions in order to walk his daughter down the aisle.
David Jones' drive from South Carolina to Johnson City, Tennessee, was supposed to take only two hours, but Hurricane Helene had other plans, according to WJHL.
When Jones finally reached the Tennessee border around 2 a.m. after being diverted several times on Interstate 26, a state trooper told him that both interstate and side roads were covered in debris.
Jones recounted to the news station, "I said, 'You have to understand. My daughter's getting married at 11 o'clock this morning, and I'm going to be there to walk her down the aisle.'"
After learning that the wedding was less than 30 miles away, Jones decided to walk the rest of the way. While Jones has run marathons in the past, he said he found himself walking by the light of his cell phone over piles of debris.
"It just... it's awful," Jones told WJHL. "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."
At one point during his journey, Jones said he was nearly hit by a backhoe after coming across work crews trying to clear the road. He said the close encounter left him stuck in the mud.
"I was up to my knees in mud and couldn't move," Jones told the station. "And he doesn't see me. Of course, his cab is facing the other way. Most of the time, he's swinging this thing around, and I'm ducking. Really, I'm thinking this could be it. There was a lot of prayer at that point."
Eventually, Jones was able to free himself and made it back to Interstate 26. He carried a reflective stake to avoid being hit by cars.
It was during this part of the trek that Jones caught a life from a motorist Jones knew from a previous job drove him the last eight miles to the wedding.
After five hours of walking and seven hours of driving, Jones was able to make it to the wedding. He even presented his daughter Elizabeth Marquez and her husband with the reflective stake as a reminder to be a "good reflection of each other and a reflection of God," he told WJHL.
"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," Marquez told the station.
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