robots ARE safe drivers

This weekend the fun hog and I went to an area called coffee pot to do some hiking and biking. Coffee pot is on a mesa and there's a steep scary windy 16 mile dirt road you have to drive to get there. The road has a lot of hairpin turns, areas so narrow two cars can't pass each other, and huge drop offs (basically, you don't want to run off the road).

Saturday we did the devil's causeway (the 10 mile loop, not the wimpy 6 miler) and literally got to the car right as a torrential downpour started.

on the narrow section of the devil's causeway

I didn't think much about the rain until Sunday afternoon when we attempted to drive down coffee pot road so we could go to the glenwood springs hot springs. It had rained steadily from around 4 pm saturday until around 1 pm on sunday. The dirt road was a fucking mess. There was thick mud everywhere and it was almost impossible to control the truck. Add to that other cars coming up the road. Scary.

So FH decided, about halfway down the road, that I should take a turn driving. I'd never driven his truck before so that made things even more interesting. I started on a straight section of the road and things were going okay. Then I drove around a hairpin turn and quickly realized the truck was going to go where it wanted in spite of me trying to steer. That mud was harder to drive in than snow or ice.

I sort of got control of the truck and was starting to relax when suddenly, around a turn in front of me, we saw a guy in a truck with a horse trailer coming towards us. There was a pull out on the turn that he could have used to let me pass but FH thinks he was afraid to stop in the mud. The truck was coming towards us at a very narrow section of the road. I tried to brake and coax the truck over to the side so the guy could pass but the truck neither slowed nor went in the direction I was steering. I felt the panic rise at the thought I was going to total FH's truck less than 60 seconds after I had started driving it.

I said "I have no control over the truck. The truck is not stopping." I kept feathering the brakes and trying to steer. I literally got the truck over and stopped about 2 feet away from the truck coming towards us.

I'm about to total your $60,000 truck

I got the truck back on the road after the other truck passed us. My hands were literally shaking. FH said "good job driving" and I was like "are you kidding???? I almost just wrecked your truck!" I showed him how my hands were shaking and he started making fun of me saying I had said "the truck is not stopping" in such a robotic voice that he didn't even realize I was scared. Then he said "well, if you had driven the truck off the cliff I would have died but they would have just had to replace your circuits".

Ha. Ha. Ha.

The rest of the story is that we decided to stay until Monday morning because we didn't want to risk hauling the toy hauler down that shit road for fear it would jack knife or possibly slide off the cliff and pull the truck with it. We figured there was no way it would keep raining after the skies cleared on Sunday. After all, we're having a drought.

Except that around 4 pm on Sunday it did start raining again, and rained consistently through the night. I wondered if I was going to have to call into work and if we'd be stuck until Tuesday. Luckily it stopped raining around 830 Monday morning and by 11 am we were able to get down coffee pot road. Not saying it was easy but FH is a great driver.

Moral of the story: my family brings torrential downpours every place we go, even the middle east.