New Miserable Experience

Well, something happened to me today - technically it was yesterday as I am writing this at 3:15am - that had never happened to me in my 32 1/3 years on the planet. I was driving home on I66 this afternoon about 1:00pm and suddenly traffic slowed to a crawl - as it often does on I66. Then I hear the sirens and see the flashing blues and reds - there is a car accident up ahead, big surprise. Now 4 lanes of traffic have to squeeze down into one lane - good times!

So I am crawling along and everyone is merging and finally I am almost past the accident when suddenly a big old fire truck drives up and blocks all lanes of the highway. I am now the second car in line. I am thinking - no big deal, they are just turning it around so they can get closer to the accident. Nope, they park it and walk away and then I hear it. The unmistakable thumping of a helicopter closing in. Can this be? Oh shit, it is! It's a life flight and it is going to land on the highway.

I can honestly say that I have never before had to wait for a life flight to land on the highway I was driving on. I have seen them on occasion from the other side of the jersey barrier, but this bad boy was coming right to me. So they land and the EMS and paramedics do their thing and get someone, maybe more than one person - I really couldn't see - on the stretcher and onto the chopper and off it flies - 42 minutes later.

Hopefully, they got to the hospital in time to save a life. Certainly I was inconvenienced today, but it really was no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, I think to myself if I was 2 cars ahead of where I was, I would have been 40 minutes ahead the rest of the day. Life is a game of inches, for sure.

Well, once they gave us the thumbs up to be on our way we had an open highway. I was the second car in line, so I only had to pass one person and I had nothing but 4 lanes of white lines in front of me. When am I gonna get another chance like this, I thought to myself. An open highway, every police officer within 10 miles was behind me at the accident site - so I put the hammer down. I got the ghetto cruiser up to 103 mph! My exit was the first after the accident or maybe I could have gotten up a little more speed or maybe my car would have exploded. We will never know, I figure that was a once in a lifetime run. Seacrest out!