Route 74 was getting icy on the way to our weekend road trip down to Clinton, IL. Just after a large truck scared the crap out of us by dropping a lime sized rock into my windshield at 55 mph, things started to get interesting. (The rock did NOTHING to my windshield, miraculously.)
I was tooling along right around the 65 mph speed limit, when Tasha noticed that there were a handful of cars in the ditch along the road. No problem, the road still seemed pretty good.
We hit the top of a rise and we saw another few cars along the road, so I started to slow down. Right around here, just before the signpost you can see in the satellite image we narrowly missed a car that had skidded to a stop horizontally across both lanes of traffic.
As I swerved to the left to narrowly miss him this put me into a skid (at around 60 mph). I quickly turned my wheels down the road to stop my leftward movement, however this started me skidding up the road at an alarming rate. Braking wasn’t helping, as apparently there was black ice in this region however it did catch enough to start me heading toward the right side of the road.
I hit the brakes, turning my wheels to the right (now pointing the wrong way down the road to try to stop my movement to the right. Somehow, this got me moving faster off the road, however luckily I saw that I was heading near exit 125, so I tried to aim for the white stripes knowing that there would be that rough grooved “wake up” strip in the painted area to keep idiots from driving into the ditch.
Thankfully my front wheels caught and brought me to a James Bond style halt, with the back half my car swinging to a full stop in the white painted area of the ramp. I had avoided the wayward car in the road, all nearby traffic, and the ditches on either side of Route 74 with only a frightened wife, an increased heartbeat, and one badass adrenaline hit to show for it. Looking at the satellite back, we figured that I skidded for around 100 ft before coming to a stop.
The road was bad all over as well… upon turning toward Bloomington we found several more cars in ditches and a jackknifed semi holding up traffic on the other side of the road. Luckily we made it to Clinton in one piece and elected to not travel any more for the day, having pushed our luck as far as either of us was comfortable.
The rest of the weekend was very relaxing. We got to eat at Ted’s Garage, visit a Wal-Mart that time forgot, and listen to a redneck order “chicken neuuoooogets and a cheesebooger with extra peeeckle”. Good times were had by all!
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