A close call

On the way home from Victor's indoor soccer game tonight (a 6-6 tie, with the other team recovering from a 5-3 halftime deficit), we found ourselves taking an unexpected detour. It had been snowing earlier in the day, so the roads were a bit greasy on the way down into Whitby, but otherwise no problem. The drive home was a bit more fraught.

Coming north, just about where the 407 is eventually going to come through our area, we hit some black ice and had an unscheduled off-road experience. The traffic was light, thank goodness, so even though the road went to the left, I continued in a rough straight line through the [empty of opposing traffic] oncoming lane and then across the gravel, down into a ditch, up the other side of the ditch, and then about 20 metres into a field.

I have to admit, in the past I've sometimes wondered just how people got themselves into odd situations like this. I usually assume that they were travelling too fast, or not paying attention to road conditions, or just plain careless. In my case, I was well under the speed limit, paying what appeared to be careful attention to the condition of the road, and still ended up sitting in a snowy field looking stupid. I could easily have made the situation worse . . . by trying to brake or trying to steer in the direction the road was curving, for example . . . but there's a certain peaceful feeling once the situation has gone fully pear-shaped and all you can do is mitigate the consequences as they come along. I don't recommend this as an experiment, however.

Victor and I were both fine . . . seatbelts fastened and not enough impact to deploy the airbags, and from what I could see in the flashlight beam, the Quotemobile had only suffered minor damage. I had been planning to go in to the dealership tomorrow for an oil change, so I'll have them look to see if there's more significant (that is, more expensive) damage that isn't immediately visible.

Getting out of the field was a bit more effort than getting into it. I had to drop into four-wheel drive and find a more solid portion of the ditch to cross to get back to the road. I don't think I'd have managed without the 4WD. Having accomplished that, and resuming our interrupted journey, we found that we were far from the only folks to have left the road . . . we'd just been the most southerly. There were three or four vehicles abandoned in the ditch or through the ditch and into the Hydro field beyond, plus plenty of dramatic skidmarks in the road to show that several others had nearly had the same experience, too.