One very interesting moment today: coming north on Hwy 169, a semi pulled out to pass us... an idiot in a car pulled further out to pass the truck... on the far shoulder... with traffic coming at us. I moved to the right shoulder to make room for the truck; he got on his brakes to tuck back behind us, the idiot in the car swerved back to our lane (well, the lane that we had just vacated in favor of the shoulder) about a nano-second before the on-coming traffic passed us! Here's an example of where you may be doing everything right, but circumstances (and the idiocy of others) can make things take an ugly turn. Had we not been watching this unfold in our mirror, the outcome may have been seriously ugly. By the way, Hwy 169 is a TWO LANE highway in that area.
I said to myself, "Self, that truck isn't going to make it around you before that on-coming car gets here. Oh, Self, look again - the dumas in the car is coming around the truck that is coming around you! Self, this has the makings of a bad Drivers' Ed film!" Things got kinda busy kinda quick after that, so I didn't have time to answer myself. If I had slammed on the brakes, the truck would have most certainly rear-ended us. If I had stayed in the lane, the passing car would have hit us from the side. As it was, the look on the driver's face coming at us probably mirrored mine as he went for the shoulder on his side of the road. Pretty sure we were harmonizing on expletives.
Fortunately, I have plenty of experience driving in deep south Texas, where they not only drive on the shoulder, they pass on the shoulder... or the sidewalk... whichever is available. In over 300,000 miles of RVing, this is only the second really close call. The other was driving a 40' motorcoach on a snowy Interstate in Utah, when the car in front of us spun out. I wrote a thank you letter to the chassis manufacturer after that one. The ABS brakes on the coach likely saved the life of the woman in that car. Today was more of a "you're kidding me?!?" moment, followed by a "oh, come on!?!" moment. In the words of the philosopher Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does."
We were fortunate that all that stupid didn't rain down all over us today.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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