h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gotta love heavy snow and thick slush. Took me an extra half hour to reach the campus today. Fortunately, I had actually done my homework on the previous evening and didn't need to rush anything to get through! I was happy to dangerously swerve at the lightning speeds that lie between 30 and 40 miles per hour.

Now then. It seems the library has a book that I would otherwise have to shell out 10 bucks for at the book center. I think that I'll take the free option.

Amazing how fast those speeds seem under those conditions, eh? I hate slippery roads - they are one of the reasons I hope to eventually retire in a warmer climate. I've spun out twice on slippery roads. The first time, I was a rookie driver and didn't know any better. I was following a friend and he went through a yellow light on a rainy night. I stepped on the gas and went through behind him. The road was slippery and the car skidded. I didn't have the feel for correcting for the skid and over-corrected. I spun around the other way and went sideways into the curb, bending the wheel rim.

The second time was a little more serious. By that time I was a veteran driver and could handle normal skids. I was on the highway, doing about 50 mph, early in the morning. We'd had freezing rain overnight and the salt/sand trucks hadn't done ALL of the highway. I saw the car way in front of me start to slide and lots of cars in the ditch near there. I took my foot off the gas and immediately the car started to skid. I corrected for it, but I was on ice and it only slowed the skid down. The car ended up on the shoulder, facing back the way I came. I just put the car in gear, turned around and continued driving, but much slower. What an awful feeling it was to not be able to control the car, even though I knew how.

Glad you got there in one piece. And I guess that means you don't live in residence.

At least I'm spared from that sort of near-death experience, thanks to the warm SoCali climate.

Then again, I don't think the freeways around here can be duplicated anywhere else in the world... free-for-all ways at 65+ mph

I'm bad enough of a driver as it is, so I shouldn't talk...

I got a license. I use it to shimmy open locks. You think your free-for-all ways are dangerous? The last taxi I took, the driver used to be a motorcyclist in Calcutta, or so he said while zipping up the west side highway at 85 mph where the lanes were - I swear to god - 5 feet wide in order to squeeze those extra "lanes" in. You know: the left shoulder and the right shoulder. Pssh. When will they just ban cars from Manhattan island?

Well, I forgot the exception of New York taxis. Pardon me.

A New York taxi almost hit me, once. It was a nice experience, really.

I did a spin out once. Drivin' down a highway at....oh, I dunno....70, 75 mph. Since it was winter, I decided to at least make myself a *bit* safer by taking the middle of the road for myself (it wasn't a marked highway, so that type of thing normally isn't frowned on out in the country roads.) I notice a car heading towards me, so I say to myself, "I'd better move fully into my lane."

So I began to move to the legal/safe part of the road right where the only patch of ice on the mile's worth of road was located. Naturally I started rotating in a counter-clockwise fashion while still travelling forward at roughly seventy miles an hour, managing to avoid both the oncoming car and the team of construction workers on the right shoulder of the road. Within a second or so I was facing backwards, still clipping along merrily. I said, "Oh, I know how to drive backwards, I've done this before." So I began to steer as if I was driving backwards (which I was), for some reason totally forgetting that the car was still rotating (which the laws of physics didn't).

I had enough sense to stop that steering attempt and go for a wiser one then, and the car rapidly drove off of the road. Now, I somehow avoided the trees on that side of the road, but the thing that was the most interesting was the ditch between the road and the field on the other side. Normally the car would've rear-ended the interior of the ditch as gravity took hold, probably turning the car over, but thanks to the fact that my side of the ditch was higher my car actually jumped the ditch, succesfully landing in the field on the other side.

When I figured out how to drive out of the ditch, I made sure that the construction crew was safe, figured out that the little adventure had shaken lose the cover for one of the rear lights, and merrily continued my day.

And the car is still servicing me just fine.

Bet you had a bit of adrenaline in your system after that, Affy!

I had an encounter with a ditch once. I was driving on a divided highway - 2 lanes going each way with a grassy ditch in the middle. It was snowing a bit, but the road was clear, so I was driving at about the speed limit: 60mph. Every now and then, we (I was driving with a work colleague) would pass a windy spot and the snow would swirl and visibility would go down to near nothing for a moment or two. But that was no problem, it would clear in a few seconds and be fine.

Well, we hit one of the white-out patches. At the time, I was driving in the left hand lane. This particular patch lasted longer than most of them, and when I came out of the other side, still doing 60mph, I saw in front of me, a truck in the right lane and a car in the left lane passing the truck. Both of them going about 20mph. I hit the brakes, but knew there wasn't enough time to stop and that I was going to plow into the back of one or the other. I switched to the right lane and looked at the shoulder. It was a narrow gravel shoulder, not as wide as the car, and beyond it was a ravine. Nope, that wouldn't do. So, I switched back to the left lane. The shoulder on that side was gravel and equally narrow, but beyond it was a ditch about 4 feet deep. I figured that side was the lesser of 2 evils and steered onto the shoulder. Well, the two wheels on the left side of the car went into the ditch, while the two no the right side stayed on the gravel. I was still moving faster than the idiots up above, and after driving in the ditch for a short time, I turned the wheel and eased the car back up and onto the road. It turned out that I had passed the two slow-pokes while driving in the ditch.

Once the two of us got our breaths back, I started thinking about the experience of the person in that car, passing the truck at 20mph. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a car would zip by, passing him in the ditch. The thought of that started me laughing and when I told my colleague why I was laughing, the two of us just broke up. I suppose that had as much to do with tension relief as to the actual humour, but it was a close call.

You probably had a bit of an adrenaline rush as well, GL.

I've got a favorite story about a ditch on the side of the road, but I wasn't really driving my car very fast. That was the actual problem, come to think of it.

Some time ago....two or three years, I'll say,....I was driving home in the crummy station wagon (colored gray) that I had at the time. Just a month or two earlier it wasn't a crummy station wagon, though, it was perfectly good. But lately the car had started dying at the most awkward times. Normally at stop lights or stop signs (although it stopped once when I was in the middle of a right-hand turn).

Anyway, I was driving home after drama practice at school one evening (I can't remember what the production was, but I want to say that it was Harvey) and had taken the back roads due to the recent car trouble. I was travelling up that road, and stopped right before the road crossed with a highway (stupid Stop signs....) that was my real last barrier before I was on the road to my house. Unfortunately, as soon as I stopped, so did the car's engine.

When the oncoming traffic mercifully vanished, I tried to restart the car. But it just wouldn't turn on. I was only a little over a mile from my house, so I decided that it wouldn't hurt anything if I just walked home. However, I couldn't just leave this station wagon right in some upcoming car's path.

I opened the door, put the car into neutral, and began the task of pulling the car to the side of the road. Now, I forgot about the surprisingly steep ditches on the sides of the road and was a bit confused when the car started moving off the road faster than I was pulling it. I realized what was happening, and tried to push it back up, away from the dry ditch.

If I had noticed a millisecond sooner I might've succeeded, but as it was I was pushing upwards at exactly the point where my strength was equal to that of gravity's downward pull. The car wasn't moving at all. When I realized that my muscles would give out long before the gravitational constant of the Universe did, I just let go of the car and jumped away as it leisurely rolled into the ditch.

Now, this is the part that confuses me to this day: the car was fully in the ditch, AND YET it was still blocking the road. I can't even remember how the car was positioned at the time, but that's the way it was.

After I walked home, we were able to call up a friemd with a van, hopped into our own car, and drove to save the station wagon from the ditch. It started raining at right about the time that we tied the rope to the front of the van for the pulling operation, so we tried to finish the job before it got much worse.

We didn't keep that station wagon, I'm not sorry to say.