Blowout

I had planned on writing more about this here on TheFlux. Like how terrified I got when one second my car was fine and I was planning my day in my head and what to get Ben for his birthday and wondering if Cassidy would remember to turn in her lunch money… to suddenly being out of control and sliding down a grassy, muddy embankment into an onramp of oncoming traffic holding on to my steering wheel for dear life.

But everytime I start to go there, back to the things that went through my head when I realized that I was just along for the ride and there was nothing to do but wait for the car to stop and hope I was conscious and that the embankment didn’t start a rollover and that there wasn’t a car getting on the freeway as I crossed it’s path… it’s a dark place. A place so dark and so awful and full of horrible images that I just… can’t.

I sugar coated it a little in this post on NorCal. What I didn’t say was that I was shaking so bad that while trying to get the spare tire on the car I dropped lugnuts at least half a dozen times. And when I got back in the car I fought back the urge to get back out and throw up all over the side of the road.

Anyway, I few people have asked about the pictures @ flickr so here it is:

On the way to work on the 280 to Page Mill offramp, on a slightly off camber right hand turn, on a wet road, my left front tire blew. I was doing about 45 (which is slower than I usually go but the road was wet and my tires are not in prime condition) which is probably what made this not the WORST MORNING IN THE HISTORY OF MORNINGS and just a bad morning where I learned a valuable lesson.

My car immediately stopped turning and I went into a slide. This is a two lane offramp and I was in the right hand lane. I kept it straight while sliding across the left lane but when it hit the wet grass of the embankment the wheel dug into the mud and spun me 180. It slid across the grass and onto the onramp on the other side of the embankment where it spun 90 degrees more.

In the horrible Paint image you can see where it happened. The black arrow is the direction I was facing when I can to a stop. When I get home I’ll get a better image made. Without seeing the actual road, the turn where the tire blew doesn’t look nearly as bad as it really is.

I pulled off the onramp and assessed the damage (checked all tires, lights, turned the car on and off a few times, looked under the car for leaking fluid, keeping an eye on the temp guage). The only thing I could see at this point other than a whole lotta mud all over the car was the flat tire so I threw on the spare and ended up only getting to work about 20 minutes late.

Lesson 1: Don’t procrastinate getting new tires. It was stupid of me and if it hadn’t been 5:40AM and there was more traffic on the road, I could have seriously injured myself or, even worse, somebody else.

Lesson 2: Slow the fuck down. I’ve taken that turn much faster than that. Granted, never when the road is wet and not in the last month or so because of the tires. But I have. And while it’s fun, it’s not the place, or the turn, or the time to be “having fun” on.

Lesson 3: My Brembo t-shirt carries bad karma.

Lesson 4: Ben is a wonderful boyfriend. He managed to calm me down a bit when I called him once I was back on the road and he was really concerned about me and my state of mind but gently reminded me how foolish I’ve been for not changing the tires sooner than I should have and to see this as a lesson worth paying attention to.