I spent the weekend (Friday through this morning) visiting my sister and brother-in-law. The weekend was lots of fun. I caught up with my good friends Brooke and Sarah (whom I’ve known probably longer than anyone else my age) and finally met some of my sister’s friends I knew only in name.
The most interesting event of the weekend, though, occurred only a little while after leaving home. I was driving west on 40 when I glanced over at the speedometer (in the MINI, the speedo is in the center). When I looked up, the pickup truck about 25 yards in front of me was heading into the median at 70 miles an hour. The next thing I saw was a gas can flying out of the truck’s bed and bouncing down my lane. By the time I figured out how to evade the gas can, the truck had spun out, hit the guardrail, and was rebounding across the freeway, sliding sideways and flinging debris (a cooler, plastic bottles, and assorted junk) everywhere. Eventually, it spun halfway back around and shot, backwards and at about 40 miles per hour, into the embankment on the right shoulder. I pulled over to help and the driver said he had fallen asleep. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but I’m pretty sure the transmission casing was cracked – something was leaking and hissing, directly under the rear of the cab, not a tire or in the engine block. Yikes.
Needless to say, that woke me up! The rest of the trip, thankfully, passed without incident.
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