Spinnin' around…

Yesterday was the closest I’ve come to being killed for a very long time. Driving back from a lovely trip to Kitchener, Canada (more on that in a moment), Lo. and I hit a patch of black ice in the road, just at a point when the wind was blowing hard enough to knock us and the cars in front of and behind us into a spin – the car in front of us spun off the road, I turned to go around him and the car spun across the road, did 180 degrees and we ended up on the central reservation facing the wrong way with more cars and SUVs spinning off the road around us. The spin itself was scary, but we didn’t hit anything, and the central reservation brought us to a fairly quick halt. However, the feeling of watching other cars spin, knowing that if one of them came in your direction it would very possibly kill you – given that we were facing the direction they were coming, so it would’ve effectively been a head-on collision – is quite the most gut churningly horrible feeling I’ve had for a very very long time.

And after that, when the road cleared a little and we’d got turned round and on our way again, the next 50 miles back to where we’re staying was the most stressful nastiest drive of my life, every little movement of the car felt like we were going to spin again, every bridge felt like it was covered in ice, and on a couple of occasions we did slide a little, and my stomach knotted even further. I’ve never ever been so happy to step out of a car as I was when we got back.

So we’re not dead, and very thankful to be alive and in one piece, and to not even have to report a smashed up car to the rental firm (we had fully-everything insurance anyway, and I suggested that they check the wheel alignment, given that the wheels took more of a jolt when we hit the reservation than anything else…)

The reason we were in Kitchener in the first place was to go to a gig by Rob Szabo and Steve Strongman, two fantastic singer/songwriters, with very different but complimentary styles. They traded songs off one another, backed eachother up, and generally made a fantastic singer-songwriter-y noise for a couple of hours. Marvellous marvellous music. Definitely worth checking out both of them.

Anyway, happy christmas, bloglings, thanks for bothering to read this stuff through the year, I hope it’s been entertaining and informative. Here’s to a blogalicious, gigtastic 2008!