"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

It was bad enough that I managed to get the flu and felt like two Canadian cents dropped through the grate of the street side drain two days before. To get up Friday morning Feb. 5^th, and prepare for five and a half hours drive from Panama City Beach to Daytona beach was not on the list of things I felt like doing, but the time had come. “Let’s Go Racing Boys,” as DW always says.

Did You Say Rain? And Wind?

The entire trip was through the worst rain and hurricane wind style storm I have ever experienced, with a traffic volume at a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10.

I used to laugh when I saw signs reading “Water On Road During Rain” while driving down here from Canada. I figured that always happens back home. Well now those signs have a new meaning in my mind. The water on parts of the interstate was a foot deep or more in places.

Collisions Not Accidents

Drivers here don’t slow down and travel in packs. You can’t slow down either because you would surely get rear-ended. The standard saying is pull over and stop. Not when I see some vehicles going up the paved shoulder faster than the ones in the traveled lanes.

A high percentage of drivers were driving with their 4-way flashers on. Why? Then I figured it out, they didn’t know which way they were going to go or where they would end up.

We were not surprised when we came upon the first roll over. A car upside down in the median. Then the second, an SUV that had rolled over on the traveled portion, left part of itself scattered there, and ended up in mud in the median.

The next one a mangled mess of six or eight vehicles scattered over the median and both sides of the interstate. Each accident scene had police and emergency vehicles present, but this one had more flashing lights than a rock show.

In all we would see five or six single vehicle crashes, and two multi-vehicle demolition areas in driving rain so bad you could barely see twenty feet ahead, with everyone traveling roughly sixty miles an hour.

I am glad I was driving a gas guzzling SUV as they are often referred to, for I was sitting high enough that I could see and anticipate what was going to take place next. My long time experience and driving skills were put to the test many times and the SUV handled the water well.

I have only been nervous driving twice in my life time. This was the second time. Seemed ironic, but we were going to the races weren’t we.

Tomorrow: Arrival at Daytona Beach

-=One Day At A Time=-

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License