This day was not our best. We slept in a little which was much needed and felt soooo good. We got ready as usual. I had a weird premonition when I was in the shower that morning which I tried to shake off. We ate breakfast, packed the car, and then sat in the car for a while before going anywhere waiting for it to warm up and defrost the windshield. It was a cold morning after a night of snow. Our first. We'd been so lucky with weather and roads so far. Once the car warmed up, we hit the Starbucks drive-thru for some good coffee and headed onto I-29. I took this photo (above) not long after getting on the freeway. Within minutes after, the car started to fishtail slightly. Shit. We were rocking at freeway speed. The car continued to fish tail more and more and I remember asking Mary if she thought she was going to be able get control again. She looked at me and said, "no." At that point, things happened so fast. Mary stared straight ahead, arms braced at the wheel. Me lightly holding her left arm and calmly coaching us by repeating, "you're doing great, we're OK, you're doing great, we're OK, we're OK" as the car 360'd several times on the freeway before spinning off the road, down an embankment, spinning more in the ditch until finally coming to a halting stop. I kept thinking with every bump that we were going to roll. Thank God we didn't. Silence. I see a car pulling off on the side of the road and I get out of the car. I wave to signal that we are OK. Meet Scott Nelson from Grand Forks, ND. Citizen extraordinaire. He approached us calmly, made sure we could start the car, guided Mary through the thick cat tail stalks and back up the embankment and took it all in stride in order to keep us calm. Nicest man ever. I couldn't stop thanking him. What was my premonition in the shower that morning? That Mary and I slid off the freeway. We were now sacred to drive on the freeway and managed 30 mph with the hazards on until the next exit and headed to a small town gas station. The attendant directed us to a country road that paralleled I-29. We drove it the 2 hours to Fargo at a whopping 35 mph. Kudos to Mary for forcing herself back behind the wheel and moving forward. The thought of a winter storm on our tail was incentive to keep going and get back into warmer weather and onto drier roads. Mary insisted on driving the entire day as "therapy" and we stopped briefly in Fargo, then Sioux City, SD and finally Omaha, NE. We managed to survive on humor cracking jokes about doing a little random landscaping and taking out a corn field, and how we suddenly needed a pair of those nasty balls dangling from our cars. I was thrilled to find ball keychains at our pit stop in Sioux City and purchased a silver pair for Mary (her request) and a gold pair for myself. Mary was mortified that I made a beeline for the balls in front of everyone in the store but was appreciative of her new keychain once we were back in the car alone. Instead of 'fist bumps' we now have our signature 'ball bump' for good efforts. Hysterical. We plan to make 'North Dakota Landscaping' t-shirts and submit a small thank you story to the local Grand Forks newspaper to publicly thank Scott Nelson for his kindness and help. Things like that shouldn't go unnoticed. Omaha was a welcome sight and we pulled in to the nearest hotel, kicked back, processed the spin out as much as we could, and slept. I'll report about the 2:00 am fire alarm and Mary's alien encounter in the next post. Check out our balls:
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