[Bill V]

You just put me in mind of one of my many New York to California drives. During one trip in March of 1980, I was driving west on I-40 (before it was completed), through New Mexico at night in my '79 Toyota Corolla. It had been raining and the road was wet or so I thought and the road had shiny appearance. I was in my early twenties and was still too bull headed too admit I needed glasses to drive so I couldn't tell what I was really driving on (maybe that was a blessing in disguise).

Well, by the time the sun started to come up, I was already in eastern Arizona, only to find out that what I was driving on all night was not a wet road, but ice, some very slick ice at that. For miles I saw vehicles, mostly tractor-trailers strewn in the median, some overturned. That definitely made for some white knuckled driving.

Suddenly, I came up on some stopped traffic. We were there for the better part of 30 minutes. When traffic started to move again, I put her in gear in let up on the clutch. My all-weather tires were turning, but I wasn't moving, except maybe the rear end which wanted to go to the right so I cut my wheel all the way to the right and let the car wander to the shoulder, which strangely enough had no ice on it at all. Anyway, I drove for what seemed the next few hours with two tires on the shoulder on the other two on the ice. Two weeks later, headed east, I saw no signs that anything like that had ever happened.

That was an interesting trip, to say the least. I never ever did experience anything quite like that again.