My Latest Car Crash

So I promised everyone pictures and here is the first one. For those of you who don't know, yes, I crashed my car on I5 by the fairgrounds Monday afternoon. It's been a busy couple of days dealing with insurance and car shopping. I'm really sad. I LOVED this car. It's been a really good, safe, sturdy, reliable car, and lots of fun to drive. Plus Uncle Jerry helped me buy it and that was our last car buying adventure together. It's been to Texas and back a couple times, and was just my favorite car ever.

Yes, we are ok. Basically, we were driving down the freeway in the far right lane and the guy next to me decided he wanted to be in my lane. He was coming really fast and it was not one of those situations where he noticed me and quickly switched back out. He was half way in my lane. My first instinct was to try and quickly move to the shoulder, which is really big. I hit those grids, though, and my tires started slipping. I somewhat regained control and tried to get back into the real lane. Then guess what! The guy attempted to lane change right into me again! I still wasn't completely straightened out from my first attempt to avoid him, and this time went into a spin. We made 2 complete 360 degree spins headed towards the ditch on the side of the road, and landed passenger side down as you see. Scary ride. The worst part was watching to see how Quinn was going to land and seeing everything from the car (I carry a lot of crap around, which I will no longer be doing) fly at him and hit him. I was really worried that he would be hurt.

Fortunately when we landed Quinn was fine. He unbuckled and crawled out the back driver's side door. Some off duty police had been behind us and stopped, and they held the door open while he jumped out. I was also trying to get out (though hanging by my seat belt, and fortunately we have no pics of that for you!) and they helped me get my arms out of the window and pulled me through there.

The other driver actually did stop, and when the on-duty police and everyone got to the scene and started talking to him, it became very apparent that he is at least partially deaf! No wonder he could not hear me honking furiously. He kept motioning to his ears and making hand signals to not talk to him because he couldn't hear, and had a really severe speach impediment. Traci can tell us... that means deaf, right? Anyway, 95% sure the guy was deaf, which really pissed me off because I was absolutely baffled as to why my horn did not wake him up. People try to change lanes on top of other people all the time, but the horn never fails to wake them up and avoid collision. Why is this guy licesed to drive?!

The whole thing sucks, but I did come out with a few lessons. The first one is that I need a defensive driving class. The second one is not to drive with a bunch of crap in my car. Granted all of the compartments flew open, but I had a stack of files from work in the back seat that flew, and cd cases everywhere. The other thing, and this will be a hard one for me, is no more dogs in the car without a crate. I am horrible about letting the dogs ride loose, and thank goodness nobody was in there because they would have probably died and also severely injured us in the process. I am still not sure what this means for the big dogs whose crates will not fit in a car. Maybe they just don't ride anymore.

More pictures to come later. I had to get my things from the car yesterday and I got some pics at the body shop where you can really see the damage. They are taking it over to a salvage yard today. Sniff.