One point five hour commute

I set a new personal record tonight on the way home. It took me approximately one and a half hours to drive home.

Of course half of that time I wasn’t even in my car.

You see I was driving along the back motorway, moving onto the Puhinui Bridge when a car decides to make a sudden lane change, in the wet, in a 100km zone.

Luckily I was preparing to slow down as I was approaching backed up traffic. Needless to say that my foot depressed the brake peddle a lot faster and harder than I was aiming to, locking up my wheels on the wet surface and making myself a passenger in the car I was driving.

I slammed into the side of the fairly new Daihatsu Pyzar and bounced off into the concrete barrier where I came to a stop. The Daihatsu however seemed to be keen to just continue on. Fortunately he had second thoughts and pulled over, and backed up towards me.

It was about now that I realised I was going to have to breath in to get out of my door, as it didn’t want to open as far as it had just 20 minutes ago. The passenger door wasn’t an option, what with the car being hard up against a concrete barrier.

I wrote down the details of the Daihatsu and then approached the driver, asking for his driver’s license. He seemed hesitant, but returned to his car, only to come back to me and apologise, but his son had thrown it out the window when he picked him up from school.

Oooookaaaay.

He then seemed distracted when I asked him for his name, after some pestering his partner emerged from the car and told him to spell it out for me, which he then did.

After the exchange they went on their merry way whilst I surveyed the damage.

Thankfully the car was still drivable. Unfortunately the wheel had taken most of the impact. The wheel cover was spread all over the left hand lane of the motorway and the tire had a nice puncture wound in the side where the metal lip of the wheel had been bent back into the tire.

I was going to have to get dirty whilst I changed a tire on the side of a busy motorway. Lucky for me I had managed to ‘park’ the car right against the barrier so had a fairly safe amount of room.

Of course by the time I got going again, I was stuck in the middle of rush hour. Still, I managed to set a new personal record…

UPDATE: I decide to check out my sitemeter stats after making this post and discovered that the last two visitors had come from a web page I had set up a while ago, but long since forgot, and on that web page, if you scroll down is a timely quote…