Close encounter, but not with any aliens

[Jayhawk 29]

We had a close call of a not so good kind today. I am a fanatic of keeping my distance when traveling at my cruising speed. Today my practice in two areas saved my bride and me, my four legged daughter, secondly my truck and my TT.

As we all know major interstates is a race track for way too any people. So I let all the pretend race cars just buzz right on by me. I firmly believe that when towing trailers they have a way of acting in a way that can create unsafe conditions on multi lane roads and really with tractor trailers that sucks you into them if you are not lucky. So on average I am a 60 mph guy.

Well we were buzzing along and all of a sudden car parts were flying in front of us and we saw a pick up truck on top of a small and older sedan and then back on the road again with its headlights directly towards us. By the appearance of both neither should have been on the highway, except on the back of a rollback wrecker.

Fortunately , when everything was said and done, someone upstairs was looking out for us. I hit the brakes so hard my own brakes smelled inside of my truck for a long time. I got my truck and TT close to being stopped and drove to the right onto the shoulder around pieces left of the highway, which was mainly in the second lane on a one way four land section. When I got beside the main sections of the two vehicles it was a truck and the sedan chained together and towed with people sitting inside the the sedan.

What I think happened and what I saw after thinking about it was that one of the vehicles got snatched and started swerving and spun the lead vehicle around and the other one caught up with it and was run over the other. I wished I would have had a dash cam now.

So folks don't tailgate when towing and have all your equipment in good working order and especially good tires that grips the road. And lucky for everyone else behind us with any distance there was a HP in the far left lane and we saw his lights in the rear view mirrors and he or she got stopped and I guess dealt with the scene.

 

[JFlightRisk]

Yes, you all were very lucky. Nice job of avoiding a catastrophe.

 

[OnTheGo]

Nice work of describing the incident. Let that be a lesson to all of us.

"... I am a 60 mph guy". Slow and steady wins the race.

 

[Jayhawk 29]

In part the stars were lined in our favor. I think back about how many times I and I think a lot of us have spoken in reply to people about a purchase guided around their vehicle and will it tow a certain rv. People will look solely at manufacturer weight specs as a guideline in choosing a rig.

Well its not always if a certain vehicle will tow an rv, but will it stop, when push come to shove, so to speak. This was the push come to shove too. Of course when I look back over the years at what we matched our combination of tow vehicle to the tow type, this could have been a different outcome.

The numbers on my truck is provided as 14,200. Towing ability ain't stopping ability either. But some of this is a learned, matched from past experiences. But we all try to share some learned experiences. Luckily we were not in the Rockies or even in the hills of Kentucky. This was the foothills of western North Carolina.

 

[Parcany]

Glad you and Family are ok.

 

[Travln2]

I leave a decent space in front of us. If a hotrod squeezes into that space, I don't tailgate him, I just let off the gas and open up the space again. There are plenty of unexpected things that can happen, such as your experience, so I leave myself plenty of reaction time. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Old and soft]

Just another day in the big city. What I heard was your brakes were overworked and stinky. Like they were pushed too far/hard. Yea, you were lucky. Sounds like not enough brake for your load. Panic stops shouldn't smoke your brakes.

 

[Jayhawk 29]

Just another day in the big city. What I heard was your brakes were overworked and stinky. Like they were pushed too far/hard. Yea, you were lucky. Sounds like not enough brake for your load. Panic stops shouldn't smoke your brakes.

I watched a few NASCAR races and they have a tendency to create big black marks on the racetrack sometimes. Their tires also leaves a funky smell too when I have gone in person to a race. So while your point may be valid, we can always Monday morning quarterback to what ifs. Tractor trailers have plenty of brakes and designed for the extreme loads by comparison to our rvs. But they too don't always stop on a dime without giving off some smell too. They also wreck their trucks on occasions by no fault of their own or by not staying afar enough away from vehicles in front of them.

Sometimes there is never enough brakes when driving at cruising speeds and you are approaching front end fenders and some related front end parts like a tire that's been removed and randomly spread across two lanes.

The natural tendency of quick thinking is to slam on the brakes as you are approaching closer to issues like we experienced . The closer you get to the crap the more you naturally respond in one manner, pressing the brakes while attempting to avoid obstacles that could ruin your day.

Since I did not receive any scratches on any related exterior parts and I lived to tell the story, then the stars were aligned in my favor. But none of us will ever get out of this world alive. So when looking back we can all say that we fall short of perfect and perfection in our daily lives while on the worldly location.