City - Half way to Princeton State - A VERY DARK NIGHT IN ILLINOIS Country - United States
About
I haven't written a long "about" for quite some time. Those of you oldE to my pics remember those long stories. Thought I would give ya a new one tonight. Enjoy a bit of Jimmie-ness.
Flying. I like to fly. I have dreams where I fly. I am not much interested in taking flying lessons. MM is, though. She has wanted to learn how to fly an airplane for ages. Maybe when we are both teaching that would be a good summer activity. (Makes mental note to buy MM flying lessons.) On December 1, 2006 we had a ripper snowstorm in Illinois. I posted a few pics then. MM and I live in a rural setting and the storm dropped several feet of snow on our wee homestead. We were locked in for a few days. It was glorious. The county had to plow us out. Well, not “us”, the road I mean. We had to wait a day and some for the plows to get to us. The plows also had to do the back roads. A lot of farms around these parts and we are separated by hundreds and hundreds of acres that roll into miles and miles of land. A few weeks after the snow storm I was driving the back-roads to Princeton. The snow was gone. That is one thing really nice about Chilly-noy… three feet of snow today, baseball tomorrow. It was very dark. I was zipping along, listening to the radio. Bumping and sliding over loose gravel and sand at about… ohhhhh…45 mph. (72.42 kph in new school ) and I was just driving along, not thinking… scooting down the back road… and I had this sudden thought, “There is a “T” in the road here somewhere. I have to stop and make a right turn.” See, I had driven this road hundreds of times before. Eventually the road I was on would come to an end and I would have to turn left or right. There was no going straight ahead. At the same time I was thinking that, I zipped across the intersection. “Hm,” I mused. “Where did the stop-sign go?” Honest. There used to be a stop-sign at the intersection. I shook myself out of my cogitation, looked hard into the poorly lit distance and could make out… “CORNFIELD!!!” I grabbed my steering wheel tight in both hands, started to slam on my brakes, realized in a 100,000th of a second that would do no good at all, took my foot off the brake (and wisely kept it off the accelerator pedal for a bit) held on and let nature do its business. I hit the burm (slight rise of earth and gravel) right at my 72.42 kph (45 mph in true coinage) and felt my Chevy Lumina do something I am sure it had never done before…. go air-born. I was flying. Yeah, yeah, yeah... it was only 10 inches (25.4 cm) up and a silly distance of 4.57 meters (15 feet)… here my history acumen has to kick in. I digress a moment: To prove flight in a heavier than air machine 3 criteria had to be met. 1: The machine had to be launched on level ground. (My Lumina was) 2: The machine had to launch under its own power. (Again… my Lumina was) 3: The operator had to make a left then right turn (or right then left) showing control over the machine while in the air before landing. (Ahhh! My Lumina did not make any air-born turns. It went straight as a 2,000 pound {909.09 kg} rock.) So I guess I was not actually “flying”… but I was off the Earth. Then something else happened. I think it is called “gravity.” I came back down… “W-H-U-M-PHHHH!!!” The car shook, shuddered, my teeth rattled and I grabbed this from my scattered brain pile, “When in danger, accelerate out of the situation.” (Radio Boy told me that once. Did I ever tell you he used to race motorcycles?) So, instead of letting the Lumina sit in the middle of a soggy, muddy cornfield… I slammed my foot on the accelerator pedal. I cranked the steering wheel hard starboard and crawled, wheels spinning, mud and cornstalks flying… back towards the road from whence I flew. I saw a spot that looked rather inviting and aimed… up the rise, “thump” back to the road! Yeeee-HA! Out of the field and back on man made trails!!! I rode slowly down the road a few yards and let go of the steering wheel. I rolled straight on. No alignment problems. The Lumina seemed to have survived intact. Over the next two days I found that my hood (bonnet) does not close all the way and there is a very slight “shudder” when I get up around 65 mph (104.60 kph) which is the highway speed limit in these parts. So I survived. The car is in satisfactory shape. The stop sign that should have been there was knocked down by a snow plow a few weeks earlier and I went back to take pics. I found the stop-sign in the ditch. I took a shot of my landing and exit tracks (on the left of the pic.) and saw something that made even me laugh. On the right side are other tracks. Not mine. Seems that from the time I went sailing into the cornfield just a day earlier, someone else zoomed across the unmarked intersection and also went flying (ok, ok, ok….hurtling) into the field same as I did. That is my story and I am not changing a word.
Good writing? wellllll...... that is what I do! You have happened onto my pics at a time I have been lazy. I often write more than I should. I was once chastised by a college Prof who said, "You write like you talk." (and she meant it in a bad way) I smiled... and said, "Thank you!"
so where do the seatbelts come in? I thought yanks were too proud to wear seatbelts on account of it was a restriction of personal liberty?? Well well .. u know what? My dad dear old Neville Charles Milton Skinner wrote the legislation for the introduction of the compulsory wearing of seatbelts in the state of NSW (New South Wales) Dr Michael Henderson (Head of the Traffic Accident Research Unit [of which dad was the administrative head before being made Assistant Commisioner of Motor Transport])commented on that fact at dad's funeral. Tell MM good luck with the flying lessons
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