Nightmare on 275

Typically on Sunday’s I will work on getting my voice mails and emails caught up, and of course work on some things for my blog and spend some time on Twitter. This Sunday held a little more excitement than I am typically use to on a Sunday, even during football season when I can be way over the top. The dance school that my daughter and my niece attend was having their season ending dance recital, which is usually a four hour event at this really nice theater in St. Petersberg, Florida.

This is a new dance school that offers a music type that I prefer, the last school was all ballet which made me want to dig my eyes out with a fork every time there was a show. There were over 50 performances total, the girls did excellent in both of their performances which were Hip Hop routines. I like the music they mix for these shows, it usually is a mix of three popular songs with excellent dance transitions. Once the show ended we headed out to pick up the girls which are usually in a different area, they do an excellent job with keeping track of the kids.

Insane Limos sponsored an ad in the dance school flyer, so I had decided to take surprise the girls and take the Barbie Pink Hummer limo to the recital. After we picked up the girls we headed out the limo for the ride to my mother in laws house and than the ride out to our house, in total about an hour and fifteen minutes on the road. Much less time in a car or SUV, in a stretch limo everything takes longer than it would in an automobile. The ride home in the limo was very different than any ride in any limo I have ever been in, something to make you stop and think for a minute.

I was sitting on the back seat next to my son, Lisa was sitting next to our daughter on the left hand side of the limo and my niece, sister in law and mother in law were all to my right. We were cruising down I-275 heading towards our first exit in the journey, the girls were still bopping around after their performances. I had just cracked open a Bud Light and started playing around with the audio/video system as my son played with his Nintendo DSI as others talked.

Within a split second I heard a loud sound, I honestly still have no idea what it was either. I instantly looked over and four lanes from us I can see a dark green Chevy slam into the concrete median, it comes away from the wall and pounds against it again. By this point our limo driver Jim also noticed what was going on and instantly took the next exit to avoid the car that was slamming off of the median.

As the car continued to slam back and forth off the wall at a speed of approx 60mph, as we began to exit everything changed instantly. The little green car was no longer bouncing off the median wall, after it’s last crack against the wall the car pointed right in our direction. Slow motion can not even put into persepective what went through my mind as I watched this car darting across four lanes of traffic, a grass median and another lane of traffic aimed right at where my princess was sitting. My stomach drops even at this moment while I write this post, sickening.

As the car bounced across the grass median and continued in our direction there was not much anyone could do at this point, we had a concrete wall with about a 20′ drop to our right and a speeding out of control heavily damaged car coming at us to our left. My sister in law screamed and instantly broke into tears, I simply muttered, “He’s going to hit” in a calm but very numb voice. Lisa and our daughter had no idea what was even going on, my son sat in silence and never said one word as he looked on with an open mouth. I could not believe what was about to happen, all within and instance everything was going to change and with no notice at all. I honestly don’t even believe I had any facial expression, if anything it was probably a look of complete emptiness.

Within a moment of me saying, “He’s going to hit” the car gained traction as it came off of the wet grass median and back onto the pavement, I only remember seeing the driver yanking his hand to the left in a wild motion. It worked, the car turned straight for a moment next to the limo as it than darted back into the grass median where it came to a rest about 100′ later. A moment of instant silence fell over the car, half of the car in complete shock that something terrible was somehow avoided and the other part of the car silent not know anything about what just happened. That was until my daughter yelled, “She’s crying and I don’t even know what happened!” The perfect voice at the perfect time.

I can never explain to you as a parent what it felt like to feel those emotions and watch that unfold right in front of my eyes, I can also never explain to you how thankful I am that the situation turned out very different from what I thought it was going to be. There are no words that can ever describe it. “Thank God” will sit just fine here.

I really have not stopped picturing or thinking about the entire situation and how it all unfolded, I spent a good part of my day stuck in the funk of thinking about it over and over again. One thing that I can take from the situation that makes me laugh or at least gets me away from thinking about what went on is the fact that I took a picture of myself on the way to the recital. I used my Blackberry and at some point even bitched about how I could not use TwitterBerry or TwitPic to upload the terrible picture and tweet it as a message. I rarely like being seen in pictures, I enjoy taking pictures but I do not enjoy taking pictures of my self with the oh so familiar “My Space” type of picture. It was out of character for me to take that picture, I also put a fair amount of time screwing around to get the picture online while we drove there.

I finally ended up getting the picture online which ended up back firing because I wanted to upload the picture to Facebook than get a “share” link to post the picture onto Twitter. The picture is terrible and funny at the same time, which of course sparked some “lovely” comments from a few of the people that I know that use FB. I really didn’t expect anyone to actually look at the picture when I posted it on FB, I figured it would just get lost in the sea of updates and photos that flood Facebook pages daily. Non the less the picture of me in the Pink H2 could have been the last picture I ever appeared in, and it’s in a pink limo. I figured I would share the picture with the readers here, enjoy and feel free to take cheap shots.

Tagged as: 275, accident, florida, i-275, pink limo