A Minor Mishap

Regarding my recent vacation reflections, there's something I wish to add about our experience. Think of this as a "footnote" to my last entry if you will. No major trip anywhere is ever without some sort of mishap and ours occurred on our way home from the "Texas in California" resort. Over the years it's been our experience that we generally get to our destination with little or no trouble but we always seem to get into some sort of fix on the way home.

This time it was as we were flying along with the traffic just trying to keep up, watching for the exit to take us to Route 80 West. As I mentioned, we had never been to this place before so this was all new territory to us. In California, there are signs all over the place but there's never enough warning if you're unfamiliar with the route and if you're stuck behind a fleet of huge trucks or even one truck, it's very easy to be swept right past the exit you've been looking for without any chance of seeing it. In the nick of time, my husband saw our exit, put on his right turn signal and looked back into lane to the right in preparation to quickly move over. Bang! Out of seemingly nowhere came this car which slammed right into the passenger side of our car where of course I was seated. My heart stopped momentarily and then began beating like a trip hammer. I'd already been holding onto the handle above the window in the inside of the car for dear life; my grip intensified to the point where I could feel my fingernails making contact with the palm of my hand. As my life flashed before me (yes, I think it really did but so fast that it was a beautiful blur), I was thinking, hmm, will probably have to have this hand surgically removed from the handle. The impact felt just like playing in bumper cars at 75 mph. I've never much liked bumper cars, come to think of it.

My husband pulled over onto the shoulder and the other vehicle pulled up behind us. After it was established that we were very much alive and kicking and none the worse for wear other than my suffering from a mild case of the shakes and trying valiantly hard not to hyperventilate and pass out, my husband got out and looked at our car and the other fellow's car. Amazingly enough, no real damage was done to either. The side of ours has a small dent and several splashes of paint from the other car which appear to be permanently etched in. The other guy's car was a wreck to begin with, a true beater and all he lost was the side mirror on the driver's side. This guy was in a real hurry to get going and we suspect he may have not had insurance and/or a license. We made a small financial settlement, got in our cars, drove off and that was that.

In his lifetime my husband has been in a couple of car accidents and only he has been in the vehicle. This was my first experience of one, riding along at a pretty good clip. The minor bumper tap fore or aft most of us have had pales in comparison to something such as this. I have always felt that we've been an extremely lucky couple and this incident was a perfect example. Things could have been so very much worse. Lady Luck was certainly riding along with us that day and there's nothing like a brief flirtation with fatality to help sharpen one's focus on what's really important in life.