drive safe, drive humble

It started with a simple plan to go to work on Sunday morning and help with the project. It ended by being what I hope will be the most miserable driving adventure of my year.

Snow, the first of the winter for us, was falling heavily from the sky by around 2 p.m. and my boss said we should head home before we got stuck at the office.

Whatever, I thought. It’s just a little snow.

Scraped the snow off my car so I could see enough to drive and set out. After only a couple of miles on Route 7, I realized being stuck anywhere that day was a legitimate concern. The cars were controlled by drivers who think ridding the breaks is the easiest way to navigate icy roads. The caterpillar of traffic slowly slid east, mile-by-mile. Some parts of the caterpillar ended up on the shoulders. I was ten miles down the road an hour later.

During the second hour, while passing through Tysons Corner, I figured out how to entertain myself and keep my mind from nature’s call by slamming on my breaks and slidding a bit to freak out drivers around me.
Getting further east by taking access roads as much as possible was also fun.

Just before I got onto Route 66, I decided nature could wait no longer. Access road to gas station took me up a hill and then back down again and into a curb as I tried to stop my car from sliding into two cars stuck at the stop sign down there.

"Did I hit you sir?" I asked the driver of the car in front of me. "No, but you will if you go anywhere because we can’t move," he said.

I put the parking breaks on my car and ran to the gas station. "Bathroom is out back," the man told me. Opened door and closed it quickly after seeing man. Ran back to rescue my car so I could drive away quickly. "I’m from Idaho," I told the men blocking the intersection. "If you point your tire down the hill away from the curb, you should be able to make it down. Don't use your breaks a lot. I’ll stop the traffic for you."

Feeling good about telling two grown men how to drive on ice, I stopped one more time on my way 3-hour-drive home to help an elderly lady too. And the next morning, I stopped in the middle of a Reston intersection down the road from my office to help push another lady’s car up an icy hill.

And that’s where I locked my keys, my cell phone and my hot coffee in my running car.

"We don’t do that anymore," an officer at the nearby police station told me after I breathlessly explained what happened and asked them to unlock my car. Instead, I got a towing company’s number.

Towing company said they would take an hour so I ran the other direction to my office and got a hanger and snuck out before anyone could see me. Needless to say, people honked angrily and looked at me like I was crazy as I ran into the intersection to my car with wires, string and a pair of scissors in my hand. I’m not sure why I grabbed the scissors.

Here I have to thank Kristin, who locked my keys in my car once and determinedly led us through a successful hour-long exercise on how to break into it.

By the time I got to my office, my ego was deflated and I was glad to be at my desk and not showing off on the roads.