Saturday, January 26, 2013

rarely do I have a near-death experience so early in the morning

I almost died today. What's more, I almost took one of my favorite people with me.

How's that for a fun way to start this post off? 


I woke up at the crack of dark o'thirty this morning to drive Jenn to the airport. She left to visit her peeps in wine country and didn't offer to take me, but I'm trying not to feel offended. She does see me multiple times a week and who can say no when someone invites you to the west coast in the middle of January? Because despite what I firmly believed, temperatures in the south do indeed drop to freezing. When I went out to warm up the car, I found the whole parking lot and all the cars covered in a sheet of ice. 


Those last two sentences are very important to the following story.


Barely ten minutes after leaving my house we were drinking our Dunkin Donuts and just getting to the good conversation topics when WOOOOSH. We hit a terrible ice patch. We started sliding back and forth across all the lanes of the highway. It was so scary. What made it worse was we were ON A BRIDGE. If I could capitalize capital letters I would. How about this--- WE WERE ON A BRIDGE. Driving off a bridge is one of my very worst nightmares. 


Being from New England I pride myself in the ability to handle moderate to severe winter driving conditions, but in such a moment of panic all I could do was think "DON'T LET JENN DIE! HER HUSBAND WILL HATE YOU! DON'T LET JENN DIE! SHE HAS TWO BABIES WHO NEED HER! DON'T LET HER DIE!"


In case it is not evident, we both survived. Naturally the furthest thing on our minds was grabbing the camera to photograph what was possibly our last moments here on earth, so I created this illustration.

Please ignore the glaring errors. The sky wasn't orange, we weren't driving in an old fashioned yellow truck, and the bridge was at least 28 stories higher. 

Jenn's flight must have seemed nothing but a pure delight after that little ordeal. 

5 comments:

Jen said...

OMG!!!!! That is so scary, I am really really glad that both are ok.

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh!!! That's so scary! I'm so glad you're both okay!

I've never driven in snow or ice before so I would have probably freaked out and slammed on my brakes, which supposedly is the wrong thing to do.

Erin said...

This is not funny but it made me laugh because I can totally relate - well not really I don't know Jenn so I can't say I've ever put her life in jeopardy but I have driven in crazy conditions - in fact, I am from Kingston, Ontario - just across the border from where you lived at Ft Drum. Did you ever go over to Canada and take those terrible, scary sky bridges? They terrified me especially in the winter!

Shannon said...

Glad you survived. I never took one of those inclement weather driving classes, but after reading this I'm probably going to look into it.

Kate @ Daffodils said...

Jenn's version of this story was pretty hilarious too. You are a saint for taking such good care of Jenn!