THE STORY OF HOW I ALMOST DIED
Disclaimer: "How I almost died" may be hyperbole. It's not like I had a horrible car crash, my heart stopped beating for five minutes... I would hardly be able to write you now already, in that case.
Nor was it a clear-cut situation like someone who is shot at, and the bullet zings an inch past their head. No, what (essentially did not) happen to me may have ended in whiplash and financial ruin, but not "more". Or, I may have died.
So, winter has arrived in Germany, quite early, I feel (usually December is still soggy and rainy and it doesn't get cold and snowy [if it ever does] until January). I got my winter tires on Tuesday, because the weather forecast for the weekend was snow and cold.
So, usually, Munich an environs are quite destined for winter, being close to the Alps and all - e.g., we already got a liberal dumping of snow in late October (though it thawed the next day). But this time, southeastern Germany was actually spared the worst weather. On Friday, loads of snow were dumped on western Germany, and we got barely anything. This was the main reason for not leaving until Saturday. But still, I was lulled into a false sense of security.
When I left Munich, it was dry, and a few degrees below freezing. Now, I may have been a bad physicist here... I did not have much gas left, and was hoping to make it back to workhome with that. to save gas, I did not turn the heat on, thinking that would just use too much gas. Now, in retrospect, it's clear that air conditioning on a hot day definitely decreases your mileage, but most of the heating just comes from the air used to cool the motor...
Anyway, moving north, temps soon dropped, and it became freezing cold in my car. What was worse, I had not even put on my gloves and leather coat. Duh. So I had not even made it 100 miles north when I decided I had to put stuff on. I combined this with a trip to a Burger King because I wanted to warm up and was hungry. I had extra printed some coupons for this. ;) Incidentally, at this Burger King, I found paradise, but like Adam and Eve, i was kicked out. Well, not really, but... more on that later.
Back on the road, I was soon annoyed. My gloves have straps on their wrists, with Velcro, that you can pull tight to seal them. I had left them open, and they were dangling and disturbing me while I drove. So I decided to close them up. I checked in my mirrors that no one was nearby - traffic was very light and the next cars were hundreds of yards away in either direction. I switched on the light, tightened the straps, focused back on the street...
... and saw I was already fully on the emergency lane, heading toward the guard rail at 60 mph!!
I slammed the brakes, twisted the wheel...
And was back on the road, no problems, no damage, no cars nearby or anything.
And that was how I nearly died. I guess I was no more than half a second from impact. What kind of weirded me out was my reaction to it. No scare, no flipping out, no drained feeling of relief. Just a kind of "Oops, that was rather stupid" feeling.
The funniest thing about it, though?? Just before turning on the lights to fix the straps, I was singing "Dumb ways to die"!!
Anyway, chastened, I continued on my way. I had been lucky, but someone else had not been.
Maybe 40 miles north, I was approaching a mountainous area named the "Frankonian Switzerland" when a police car zoomed past me, flashers going, probably doing at least 100 mph! Shortly afterward, another followed, and then a... hm, not ambulance, but a fast car which carries a doctor to an accident site (not anything you can load a patient into). Obviously an accident up ahead...
It took another six, seven miles, before I came upon it. It was at the top of a hill, and there, a whole platoon of emergency vehicles occupied the emergency lane. Police, ambulance, fire trucks, and some more "civilian" cars that had orange flashers. The amount of blazing blue lights was cacophonous, almost seizure-inducing. As mentioned, traffic was very light, and two lanes were still free, so there was no backup. I drove past the crash site carefully, also of course trying to see what was going on.
Finally, past the platoon of cars and trucks, there was an area harshly bathed in the glow of floodlights, and there I saw...
Nothing.
No crashed vehicle(s). But also... No guardrail. Probably 100 feet of no guardrail. And beyond that? More nothing. An inky blackness without trees.
It seems there was a steep drop there, and something... something big! had shot out off the road, tore away a huge amount of guardrail, and plunged down the slope.
Hours later, safely home after going to the movies immediately from the Autobahn (
), I checked the news but found nothing. So I assume whatever happened was not as big a catastrophe as it looked. Maybe a single truck, driver injured but not dead. That would probably not make the news.
And it's a BIG laptop... 
I worry it will weigh too much, at least with assorted peripherals included (the transformer cable, you could kill someone with that...).
, in the business of keeping the little Platypus in business
I wasted over 5 Euros!!! 
