Once upon a day in Monteray, Massachusetts Erika and I found ourselves with time to do whatever we'd like in western Massachusetts. Shelly and Todd went skiing, but after 3 ACL reconstructions I formally announced my retirement from that sport during a lightly attended press conference. Chris and Lauren had a date at a nearby spa but we had no such aspirations. Given our shared profession, we decided to hit up a nearby college - Williams. Sure, it was snowing - heavily - but it looked so close on the map. We punched in the address on our GPS and braved the elements.
The GPS had already tricked us into rolling down a one lane, unplowed "road" on our way to the Bershires cottage. For some reason, we thought it would never lead us astray for a second time. Erika was driving slowly and carefully. We again found ourselves on what appeared to be a less-than-serviced road. We passed a van at one point and continued down the road until...the road stopped being plowed entirely and a sign informed us that the road was closed in the winter beyond that point. So...we turned around and began to head back. Shortly after we came to the same van we had passed, only now he was sideways on the road, with a healthy portion of his van embedded in a snowbank. Being the good samaritans we think we are, we decided to help this guy. Erika approached the van, only when she tried to brake the car didn't stop...it continued very...slowly...down the slope and into the van.
The good news: the van was now dislodged from the snowbank.
The bad news: there was quite a bit of damage done to our cars.
At this point I was thinking I should have just gone skiing and torn another ACL. We had nearly no cell phone service, save for a 1'x1' square on the side of the road. We successfully got in touch with the local police - that's singular, by the way, as there is literally one police officer in that town. It took him 3 hours to get to our accident scene. 3 hours. No exaggeration. When he finally arrived he looked at both vehicles and said, "Well...I guess I can write up an accident." report." If you are looking for something excruciatingly painful/boring, try sitting in 10F weather with nothing to read but a road map. Also, you and the person you're stuck with have exhausted every talking point from favorite vacation spots to which NPR show we'd cancel (mine was Story Corps, even though it's a part of Morning Edition, I really, really hate it).
All in all, we lost a day of vacation, our insurance rates might go up a bit, and we had to pay the deductible to fix our grill. But the grill was looking kind of faded anyway, and it looks brand new now.
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