I was just a kid but I remember this like it happened yesterday.

My mom and I were driving down a two lane road in Nova Scotia. All of a sudden traffic backed up as if there was an accident.

There was an accident. A gas truck was on fire on the side of the road, and people were slowing down to look at it.

Scared the crap out of me.

Driving up the road to Sugar Bowl in a blizzard in our Honda Civic. This light pick-up truck came spinning down the hill. I got the car as far over to the right as possible, and the truck missed us by inches.

Actually, the most hair-raising things happen regularly in city streets when I go to make a lawful turn and I realize that someone in a "vehicle" is going to run the red. That always leaves me playing tape for twenty minutes about whether, next time, I should speed up, back up or stand still so that my door takes the hit instead of my kids'.

There's an interesection in North Hollywood that I find very intimidating. (You may remember this intersection from the film The North Avenue Irregulars.)
It's where Vineland Ave, Lankershim Blvd and Camarillo St intersect. It's a crazy light situation and it's hard to figure out where to go. I guess that's what happens when a street, avenue and boulevard intersect, it creates a black hole.
:D

Gah, I know this intersection well (a good friend lives on Peachgrove not too far away) I hate this intersection!

I don't know if this is the scariest, several years back, on a very foggy friday night (I was not driving) and my friend was on 101 S, just coming out of one of the turns before you reach Army (now Cesar Chavez), he was speeding, and as we rounded the curve and saw the straightaway, nothing but brake lights in all lanes, traffic dead stopped. He his the brakes, the road was wet, and we ended up whacking a car in front of us and then turned around facing the wrong direction on the side of the road. Seatbelts are a good thing.

GC we hate that one too!

My worst incident was when a boulder about 3 feet in circumference lost its purchase on the back of a flat-bed truck in front of me and came bouncing toward the front end of my old Volvo -- it happened so fast that I didn't have time to brake, just swerve wildly, and when we'd escaped the big bouncy rock, my 4-year-old said "nice driving, Mommy!" which gave me the adrenaline-fueled giggles.

Driving through the flats of Wyoming on our way back home from Denver we noticed a rather large vortex heading directly toward us. There was literally no where to go, and we knew we couldn't outrun it. It was probably less than a minute away when I noticed a dirt side road off the other side of the freeway, so I cut through the median and took off down that road as fast as I could. We just managed to miss the worst part of the storm system, but I ended up having to drive through Jackson Hole and the Tetons instead of up through Montana as planned. Later, we found out that several people had been killed by that tornado system in Littleton, which is where we had been staying.

Oh, and I almost died of boredom driving through Texas.

That was me in Iowa last summer, and Wyoming and Utah and Nevada, but then I talked to NA for a while and the drive got better.

Driving to work at DFW at about 4am one stormy morning, with rain pounding on my windshield so hard I had to stop under several overpasses to let cloudbursts pass (if you've never seen just how hard it can rain in Texas, you haven't seen rain), and about 1/8 mile from the next overpass I was going to pause under lightning struck somewhere so close to me that I was literally blinded for a few seconds. I think I actually cried.

Either that, or the time my accelerating cruise control got stuck in the open position (eg: accelerating w/out need for gas pedal) and I was going 85 mph up the steep side of the grapevine WITH the brakes on at 2am. Same story as Alex, only add me pulling off on some dark mountain road exit, throwing my car into neutral, shutting the engine off, pulling the parking brake and flying out of my car, only to discover my wheels glowing orange, thinking my car was on fire, realizing my cell phone was out of power as I tried to call 911 and got cut off, and finally being rescued by some random old couple that drove past (on this quiet lonely road where so few cars drove by), and by that time being able to tell 911 I'm okay and that my discs were apparently just glowing hot, but not actually on fire (because the glow died down over this 20-minute period)

Driving to Northern Cali via the 5 one morning, through an unrelenting sand storm. Visibility was, well, zero, but I'm on the freeway ... so the slowest I deign to drive is 40mph. After about 50 miles of it not letting up, my daughter is so panicked in the back seat (and yeah, I realize we've likely used up our luck in driving that fast with no visibility for that long) - we pull over to the side of the road to ride it out.


It doesn't stop. After an hour, we imagine it's letting up a bit and start driving again, keeping the speed down to 25-30 mph.


Nothing happened to us, but driving that long at even those speeds was scary as all fu ck.

:(


When we reached our destination, we discovered that - about 6 miles behind where we pulled over to stop - a 100+ car pile-up stopped all traffic on the 5 for the rest of the day. We missed that by less than 10 minutes.



Oh, and we had to replace our completely sand-pitted windshield.

Wow, you were on the 5 for that, eh?