Scary Highway Tales, or, Stupid things I saw other people do

[wannabefree]

Once in a while we do something really stupid on the road. Or, if we are not willing to admit it, we can say we saw someone else do something really stupid. Who is brave -- or crazy -- enough to share a few stories? I have two to start off:

On one short trip I noticed a loud banging noise coming from the rear of the car every time I drove over a bump. I hadn't been out with the tear for a while and just figured it was the normal noise coming from the hitch. After an hour of driving I pulled into a town for lunch and just for grins checked the hitch. Yikes, I didn't push down that clamp thing on the hitch. Fortunately I had enough weight on the tongue that it didn't bounce off. The safety chains would have held it it if did, but I also could have had a fair amount of damage.

This guy wasn't so lucky (really, it wasn't me). I was on another short trip and had just crested a hill and was gearing down for the 7% grade on the other side, a curvy stretch of about four miles, when I noticed the guy in front of me was being passed by his trailer. YIKES!! It seems he forgot not only the clamp thing, but also the safety chains. The trailer was tooling down the shoulder on his right, and he was busy trying to crowd it over to a stop on the shoulder without pushing it over the side. I stayed well behind him until he got it stopped, then passed without pausing to gloat. No need to add insult to injury. I suppose it didn't do much for the paint job on his pickup, but it was a real piece of driving to gain control of that trailer.

The moral of these two tales is there is a reason for that 10%+ tongue weight besides trailer handling. If the trailer separates, the tongue will dig into the pavement and stop that renegade sucker quick. If the balance is to far to the rear, that won't happen and you end up in the predicament this gentleman found himself in. So always check your tongue weight before you head out (almost never a problem with a tear because the axle is usually pretty far back to begin with). My rule is if I can lift it, it's too light.

I am sure you have seen some scary things on the road. Care to share?

[TimC]

A couple days before Thanksgiving a couple years ago. I receive a call from my daughter and she is pretty shook up.

She is heading north from Green Bay coming home for the holiday. It's dark and she is traveling at 65 following a car at a safe distance on the four lane highway. All of a sudden the car in front of her veers right driving on the shoulder as it slows. Focusing on the car in front she suddenly sees a large mass skidding down the highway at high speed in the same direction of travel. She was quickly closing on the mass and luckily the object only strikes her front left tire, causes a blowout and she safely comes to a stop on the side of the road. It turns out that the driver hauling the mass was heading to camp and made it about an hour and a half from Oshkosh before the rear hitch rack vibrated out of the receiver. It was carrying a large generator and a medium sized hand truck. At high speed a head on crash with that thing could have done major damage and caused great bodily harm.

Being alone and in her early twenties and experiencing her first rolling flat you can imagine how nervous she was. Luckily several drivers stopped, helped her change to a donut spare and escorted her to Crivitz; the next town up the road. Crivitz at 10pm on a weekday is one quiet town even with in last week of deer season. After a call I drove down to rescue her and grab the flat and get her home. The next day we were happy to find a tire shop with a new tire in stock (the sidewall was slashed). The guy who caused the problem was responsible enough to offer to pay for the new tire and met us back in Crivitz to give my daughter the cash. Though it would have been nice to offer a little more for the trouble of my two trips to Crivitz to retrieve her car I didn't push it as the guy was very apologetic. I was very impressed with the Midwest Nice that these other drivers displayed to my daughter.

If you are wondering why I didn't just drive the car with the donut installed... I drove one mile on that spare and the car shook like crazy at 30 mph. I'd never driven with one on before. It was better to drive the 45 miles home and back than deal with that.

[Tom&Shelly]

Well OK. Back in the mid-80's I was stationed in England for a few years. It was the days of paper maps (for you youngsters, I'll explain later...) and, of course, the recommended procedure was to pull over to the side (left, in that case) to study the map once you got tired of being lost--er, "exploring", and finally had to figure out how to get to point B.

However, it was time consuming and inconvenient to pull over, and I discovered that whenever I came to a round-about (plentiful in that region of the world), I could simply move to the right-most lane and loop around a few times while glancing at Her Majesty's Royal Ordinance Road Atlas. Set the tires--oops, I mean tyres--at the correct angle and you hardly even had to look at the road.

A few years later I was back in the land of the big BX and on an assignment in Washington DC. Actually, I finished business and wanted to get up to Baltimore to visit a high school friend. Well, one wrong turn led to another, and somehow I managed to get on the traffic circle in front of the Capitol. (This is all true, I swear!) It circled the wrong way around, but the principle was the same, and after about nine orbits I had my trip all planned out.

Been thinking about that a lot in the past week. Those were the innocent 80's before a lot of things happened, and I've often wondered whether the Capitol police wondered about, or even noticed, the crazy guy in the rental car circling around down there.

Anyway, I wouldn't do anything that stupid anymore, nor would I text and drive, though I still occasionally use a paper map, just for old times sake.

Tom

[MickinOz]

Now, I could have been getting my leg pulled when he told me this, but it makes a good story:

Years ago my brother was pedaling road trains in Queensland.
I forget the exact deal, but they used to pull singles out of Toowomba (elevation 2200 feet) and put the trains together in flatter country.
One day he wasn't driving his own semi, he'd picked up a few days extra work driving for a freight company.
He told them he thought the brakes were a bit iffy, they said they'd look into next service.
So he's coming down from the hills and she somehow dropped all the brakes.
He's downshifting frantically, while calling up the guy in front of him on the two-way to tell him to move over and let him through or there'd be two dead instead of only one.
Bloke in front was up for the challenge.
Long story short, they talked the two trucks together and, as soon as my brother's bullbar hit the rear of the other guy's trailer, old mate in front got on the brakes and pulled the whole lot to a standstill.
The freight company was up for repairs to the other guy's the trailer, new bullbar, and a new radiator, but everyone lived to tell the story.