Be safe out there

I suspect you may have already heard this by now, but, if you don’t have to be on the road this evening, you should probably just bake some oatmeal cookies, pour yourself a stiff drink, and stay home. The family and I just made it back from Lexington, Kentucky, where we were celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday, and my grandmother’s dramatic rebound after a brief hospitalization, and the roads were a total, fucking mess. In all seriousness, toward the end of the trip, as we were making our way slowly along 23 North, we were passing a wrecked car about every three or four miles. For the most part, they weren’t terribly dramatic crashes, which was good, but it made for a stressful drive, especially as the kids kept asking how we’d survive if we left the road… With maybe one exception, the incidents we saw just involved individual cars. We saw well over a dozen of them, though. [The kids enjoyed scanning the horizon for fenders and taillights peeking out from over the edges of drainage ditches.] Thankfully, though, we avoided joining in the ditch. I’d say I lost control of the car about three times, but each incident was really brief. We’d just slide for a few feet. Thankfully, though, we were going slow, and there weren’t any cars around us to run into as the frozen road moved us from one lane to another. It could have been a lot worse, though. Someone could have run into the jackknifed fuel truck you can see above… At any rate, like I said, you should just stay home. I’m not usually one to complain about roads, as I learned to drive on the icy roads of rural New Jersey, but the conditions really are unusually bad tonight.