A New Understanding of Highway Safety

Those who read this blog regularly may have noticed that I’ve been missing from the web for about a week now. The absence was due to a need to make a cross country road trip to move the rest of my things and my fiancé from Wisconsin to California. I was sad to miss out on blogging during the trip, because I always find myself wanting to share interesting stories and ideas with the world. I have to say though,I’m glad that I have one crazy story to pass on to you as a result of my trip.

I had originally planned on blogging and tweeting from the road, to keep in touch with rest of the world, but little went according to plan on this trip…

I should first mention that before I moved to California, I sold my car. The East Bay is bicycle friendly, there’s BART and buses everywhere, so I didn’t really need one. But when it came time to move, we needed a way to move our stuff. We looked into renting U-haul truck, but it wasn’t cheap. The best option we found was to buy an old truck and rent a trailer. We figured we could always sell the truck later and get a little bit of our investment back. So we bought a 1988 Suburban from a friend. We were responsible, we had it checked out by a couple mechanics, and it was deemed sound for the cross country trip.

Somewhere in Nebraska, though, we ran into a little problem that gave me a totally new understanding of highway safety. Driving along slowly in the right lane, we were passed by a semi. The truck’s rear wheels kicked up a rock or some other piece of road debris, and our driver’s side window shattered. suburban windowWe pulled off the interstate at the next exit, but we didn’t quite know what to do after that. It was dark out, it was raining, and we couldn’t just leave the truck out for the night with a broken window while we slept in a hotel. So we pushed on, and drove to Wyoming, found some cardboard, boarded up the window, and slept in the truck.

The incident had nothing to do with the health of the vehicle. You’ll note in the picture that there’s some intense rust around the door handle–the truck is definitely old. But the shattering glass was a complete accident. We had a discussion in the truck before we decided to move on to Wyoming. Was it a good idea to keep driving on a highway next to big trucks without a window? What if another rock was kicked up and there was no window to protect the driver? We had to push on to a place where it was safe for us to park for the night, but we did so with a lot of hesitation. Because I work here at GJEL, I know what can happen when a rock or piece of cement hits a driver. It’s a terrifying prospect, but it never really hit home until the glass shattered on our truck.

A couple other things went wrong on the trip, too–we lost power steering, we had to cut some belts out of our engine, our engine overheated in the desert in Utah, and we were definitely burning some oil. But none of these problems were as sudden and terrifying as having a window shatter in our faces. It reminded us to always be vigilant while driving, because accidents can happen in ways you don’t expect.

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