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I have a story to tell that I will never ever forget. About 25 years ago my best friend and myself took a long ride from NJ to Kentucky. His sister was attending a Veterinary college there and we were driving down to pick her up and take her home for the Christmas holidays.
Some where I think it was on I-64 before Lexington we stopped at a rest stop to sleep a few hours. There was this horrible noise at the other end of the large rest area parking lot. It sounded like some one was just reving their engine quite high. We ignored it because we were so dead tired and probably should have stopped hours earlier to catch a few winks.
So a few hours later we woke up and it was getting light outside. The engine reving was still very loud. We hit the rest rooms, got in the truck and started driving away but first wanted to see what that noise was. It was an older junk box car and the engine was racing perhaps 6000RPMs. There was white smoke coming from under the hood and the inside of the car was solid white smoke. We could barely see the outline of a woman sitting behind the wheel obviously dead. She must have died and stiffened up and pushed the gas pedal. I have no idea how that engine did not blow up while reving at 6000 RPM for 3-4 hours.
What a horrifiing sound that I still think about today. We were just 24 YO or so and not exactly into trying to be a hero to get involved. About 10 minutes later after we were gone we saw emergency vehicles racing in that direction. To this day it bothers me if we should have done something. But I always know she had been dead long before we got there. And I also know that perhaps dozens of truckers parked or drove by much closer then we did and saw more then we did, and also did nothing.
When I was 15 (1970), I traveled alone coast-to-coast Boston-SF with a car pool organized by the janitor of our condo.
It was VERY adventurous, I had 5 $ in my pocket, and at one point I had nothing to eat. I asked one of the guy with whom I traveled, a hairy trotskyite militant in his twenties. It was very hard to get him to buy me a hamburger somewhere in Nebraska. He stared at me angrily during the last leg of the journey.
I had the privilege (as an European) to discover in my "salad days" this incredible America of the summer of 1970 , 5 days between East Coast and West Coast, not many European kids made such a trip by themselves then , the way some young US dropouts or hobos do it !
And then Berkeley, wow! I stayed a few days in a commune near Shattuck avenue, at the center of the "action", a branch of Bank of America had just been firebombed by a radical group, the "Symbionese Liberation Army" or something like that.
Oh we drove coast to coast in 1993. it was an ambition of my dh to do this ; we drove from Long Island NY to Vancouver in december.
Will never forget pulling into Dix, Nebraska ; population ; 325. The person at the gas station didnt know how to use the credit card machine. The big deal of the day was us tourists.
Then on the way home, we drove thru a snow storm from Missouri to Ny. Tractor trailers were blowing by us as if we were standing still and we were doing 70. It took 22 hours and we were so glad to finally get home.
We hope to do it all again with our sons. It is such an experience to drive cross country.
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Oh we drove coast to coast in 1993. it was an ambition of my dh to do this ; we drove from Long Island NY to Vancouver in december.
Will never forget pulling into Dix, Nebraska ; population ; 325. The person at the gas station didnt know how to use the credit card machine. The big deal of the day was us tourists.
Then on the way home, we drove thru a snow storm from Missouri to Ny. Tractor trailers were blowing by us as if we were standing still and we were doing 70. It took 22 hours and we were so glad to finally get home.
We hope to do it all again with our sons. It is such an experience to drive cross country.
d
d
Awesome, Awesome story!
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