Whooooooaaaaa….!
Well, they tell us they’ve made “a good recovery” of data from our busted hard drive, so we’ve got to go back up the mountain today to get it. I admit I selected the photo above for dramatic effect. Our destination, New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains, offer no opportunity to drive right off a cliff. Just high, twisty, narrow roads frequented by speeding dump trucks loaded to capacity with stone and chunks of concrete so that they couldn’t possibly stop in time to avoid an accident, driven by persons fanatically devoted to tailgating… [pause for hyperventilating]
I don’t know how long that’ll take, or how much new material I’ll have time to post today. But if you’re new here, please feel free to browse among the blog archives–you’re bound to find something that’ll amuse you.
Vaya con dios, journey with God.
Gracias, amigo.
Prayed for travel blessings … irritating tail gaters. What a blessing the hard drive was salvagable. 🙂
Thanks for your prayers! God knows I’ll need them.
God’s protection and safe travel go with you.
Catching up today – hopefully.
You’re in my prayers. (But then, you always are.)
I sympathize — in fact, I empathize. In 1974, before I shipped out overseas, my mother came out to my Air Force base in Wyoming to help me drive my cat back to her house in New York. I’d just been driving for 3 years at that point, almost all of it in low-traffic Wyoming and never cross-country, and the trip was … interesting. In the midst of truck-heavy Chicago traffic, my mother almost had a nervous breakdown (she’d never driven at all at this point). And then we went through the Pennsylvania mountains … in a blinding downpour of rain … around hairpin curves … with trucks speeding by and causing tsunamis across my windshield as they passed … my knuckles white on the wheel … my mother shouting, “Stop crying! You won’t be able to see where you’re going” … and me hysterically shouting back, “I can’t see where I’m going anyway!” Ah yes, that was a trip to remember. I wish I could forget it.
Stay safe. Stay calm. Stay blessed. 🙂
Nightmarish! Those Pennsylvania mountains are unforgiving. I, too, had an experience with them, on the way home from Williamsport. Driving at night thrugh an S curve, my power steering belt broke. Yep. The front end hit the guardrail, spun around and did the same with the back end. Looking over the edge of a very steep ravine, I said my prayer of thanksgiving!
How horrible! Your guardian angel must have received overtime pay for getting you through that one!
Another fun trip is on the bridges of Louisiana. I think they were all built by retired roller coaster designers. And you approach them from the side so you can see just how tall and flimsy they are. In the early 1980s, after bouncing ski-lift style at the top of one of those bridges and almost going off the side of another at night (no lights on those bridges, either, and I’m night-blind), I developed a permanent inability to drive on high bridges and elevated roads — which means no more highway driving at all.
Oh my goodness! That sounds like a ride I wouldn’t want to take on a full stomach 🙂 Praise God for keeping our guardian angels close!
We’re back: more on that later.
As for bridges, I feel your pain. I dare you to try the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel funhouse sometime in the afternoon when the sun is fiercely shining off the water. You drive until you get used to the glare, but then the road plunges into a tunnel and you can’t see a blessed thing. You’re in the tunnel just long enough for your eyes to adjust to the dark–oh, the approaching headlights of trucks being driven by persons as blind as you are!–and then, huzzah, back out into the golden glare of day… and again you can’t see.
I’ve been on other bridges almost as bad, but I have to say the above was the worst. Your Louisiana bridges remind of of a very high and narrow bridge in Charleston, SC, where all that stood between you and going off the edge, down, down, down into the harbor far below, was… well, chain link fence–patched with chicken wire (!) where a few unfortunates had burst through the fence and gone over the side.
I’d better shut up about this or I won’t be able to sleep tonight!