re: I won the lottery of Life today

Did your buddy win the SuperBowl before he drove off in that Hyundai?

a year or two ago, I was following a truckload of crossties and one fell off...it was flying end over end behind the truck that I was following at 80 MPH

strange thing is, it didn't scare me at all...I just moved to the other lane and drove right by it while it was still flipping down the road...

scared the shite out of me when I thought about what happened...

Holy...

I worked EMS as a paramedic for 20 years and saw a fatality and a couple of pretty badly hurt people from things like that. Scrap metal, a piece of oilfield equipment and such. Really freak things.

Excellent looking out and great reactions.

This all happened b/c you were looking ahead and paying attention on the wheel.
You had some luck with the way the cars fell, but you made that work for you.


You're on point about time slowing down; that is always the way it is. It even seems longer when you hear stuff tearing up.

I thought for sure I was going to t bone him after he bounced off the wall. Glad I was hanging back just enough to avoid that. I am glad to hear he is okay.

Thanks to reading this thread, I never want to drive again. The thought of my wife driving my 10 month old around, terrifies me.

No. But had I have been a rig right there at that time instead of a regular sized vehicle the guy whose car is shown in this thread would be deceased possibly along with someone else. I told my kids, after explaining to them how that was a prime example of maintaining a safe distance, that if I would have been a rig then people would have died for sure.

I've had some "interesting" driving experiences in my life.

Most recent was right after getting my latest new car. Drove to insurance agent (they like to get get pictures of my stuff for records as I have history of driving modified vehicles) and on way home just as reached 55 mph sign at edge of town an empty 5 gallon paint bucket comes flying off of 1-ton truck ahead of me. It bounced a couple times wildly then veered off to the side sharply. Whew!

About 3/4 of the way home a chunk of asphalt with gravel about the size of nerf basketball falls out of unsecured dump trunk sending shrapnel flying and bouncing twice as it shredded down to about softball sized before impacting my hood. Damn you dump truck trash!!

Most interesting though was showing my replacement my end of month collections route across rural Oklahoma. Driving down 2 lane highway between Tulsa and Stillwater, the general midwestern "breeze" that's always blowing picked up a refrigerator box that had been laying in road ahead. The box landed flat across the windshield, wrapping around both driver and passenger windows. I used my rear view mirror as a guide to stop on the narrow shoulder from 70mph in only 3 seconds. Scared the crap outta that gal but I was cool as a cucumber. Had seen very similar as a teen driving down I-55 from Memphis. That did not end well for the recipient so I knew what not to do. LOL

Another was the triple 360 in a 1982 Toyota Tercel on Hwy 165 south of Little Rock in a steady rain on asphalt. Went between the 1st and 2nd of 3 oncoming cars. Stopped parked perfectly on the northbound shoulder facing south. Rolled the window down a crack and lit a cigarette, to which my non-smoking sister whose car it was said, "yeah go ahead and have one".

I see more freaking idiotic drivers on 20 than anywhere else in the ATL area. Basically from just east of Bham to through E Augusta is a shitshow and I may get banned for elaborating a major reason why that is.