One-Up the Excitement

I haven't actually typed this out anywhere yet, probably because it's still a little scary, but we'll see how this goes.

Last Saturday was the day to head home. I'd originally wanted to leave after classes on Friday, but Mom talked me into waiting until Saturday morning, so that more of the drive would be during the daylight. So, woke up at five and finished packing, made it onto the Interstate by 7 a.m. And most of the drive was good. Clear skies, dry road, sun shining through all of Wyoming and most of South Dakota. Bitterly cold and windy anytime I stopped for gas, but as long as I was tucked in the car, it was good.

I'd been warned about a big snowstorm that had been circling, hurricane-like, over my hometown and about a hundred miles in either direction from there. After going through Mitchell, there were a few more drifts on the road, but no real cause for concern. Sioux Falls lacked the whiteout-conditions I'd been hearing about, Mankato was all right...Austin was where we hit some problems.

Which might be putting it mildly. Between Austin and Dexter, there was a point when I had to actually apply my brakes so that I wouldn't collide with another vehicle that had started to fishtail, and it put me into a spin that went across the road and through a mile marker. This led to rolling the car twice.

It came to a stop on the driver's side, and aside from some objects in the vehicle whacking into me during the car-blender session, I was unhurt. I called 911, the trucker who stopped to check on me called 911, and my Mom called 911 after I called her. I was in the back of the police car for most of this calling-around, and got to watch the towing guy attach the cables and pull the car back into its proper and upright position.

We found the mile-marker about twenty feet away from my car. Er, the top part of it. The snow was about thigh-deep there, so no one was interested in anything but getting back up to the road.

The car was towed back to Austin (I'm still kind of excited about getting to ride in the tow truck. I think getting to ride in 'the big truck' brings out some little-kid part of everyone), and my Dad and sister took the van - slowly - to get there. Despite how much personality our minivan has developed over the years, it at least can get through snow that our other vehicles probably wouldn't be able to handle.

The airbags never deployed, because very little of the damage had been to the front. The left headlight assembly had been ripped out (possibly the handiwork of the signpost and beginning of the roll combined), the windshield was shattered, both mirrors were punched up, and the driver's door had taken a lot of the weight and had been bent so that it couldn't be opened at all. The roof was the particularly interesting piece - one good-sized hole had been punched in it, there was what looked like a smaller stress tear by the passenger side, and the entire piece was inverted. My sister has pictures, not sure that posting them would be the best idea, though.

But, aside from a bruise or two sustained from flying objects, I'm unhurt. Most of my stuff made it okay, too. Every time I think of it, I'm just overwhelmingly thankful that things weren't as bad as they could have been.