That shit is whack

So we're heading west along the 595 to Fort Lauderdale last night at around 11pm, looking forward to hitting the town after a hectic week at work. At the intersection of the 595 and the Florida turnpike traffic had slowed to an absolute crawl. All I could see ahead of me were flashing lights everywhere and my mate and I were speculating as to what it could be. "Wow, there must be a huge pile up of cars ahead". Emergency vehicles were bloody everywhere. There were a couple of smashed cars along the side of the road but as it turned out that wasn't what was causing the problem. We looked towards the exit ramp for the 595 leading onto the turnpike and there were 30 or 40 emergency vehicles parked the whole way along. Then we looked a little more to the right and there were bloody flames everywhere! I don't know how we missed that to begin with. We didn't know what the hell was going on. We thought it could have been a plane crash or a petrol tanker. As it turns out a petrol tanker had overturned.

The enormity of things over here never ceases to amaze me. There are some seriously screwed up things that have happened while I've been over here, like four hurricanes hitting Florida and this and God knows what else.

What else? Ok, how about this one. This happened on my Christmas vacation trip at the end of last year. We were heading to Lake Tahoe from Yosemite at around 10pm and most routes in had been deluged with snow and had to be closed due to the threat of avalanches. So yeah, it was snowing pretty heavily. (Actually, because the snow was so thick it had a psychedelic effect as you drove along. It was incredibly distracting). We were about 20 miles out of Lake Tahoe and visibility was nothing when we had to put snow chains on. As we were doing this, "the woman" in the car shouted "Did you see that?!?!" We said we didn't see anything at all. A car coming the opposite direction had just gone straight off the side of the road. Fortunately there were quite a few cars pulled over so a few other people had seen what happened. We all rushed over to where the tyre tracks left the road and saw, about 150 feet down a slope that nearly went *straight down*, an upside down SUV wedged between 2 trees. We were calling out to anyone who may have been alive down there... we actually didn't think they would be. Fortunately, they were alive and fairly well. I threw a rope down to them and helped pull them up. They were a bit shaken up and had a couple of minor cuts. Considering what had just happened, I found that absolutely amazing.

Again, that shit is whack.