A vist to the Spanish church? Not quite . . .

Jaela had convinced me to go to the Spanish church in Rochester (about an hour away) with her and Alexa and the Spanish club this morning. When I got up at 7:30, I was surprised to see that several inches of snow had fallen overnight. Outside it was very pretty, but freezing. We met the Spanish club people at the campus center and then dispersed into the three cars that were going. Jaela, Alexa and I were in the lead car. We were driving down a back road about fifteen minutes away from Houghton, getting close to the highway, when suddenly the car started to fishtail, and the girl driving lost control. We ended up spun completely around on the opposite side of the road, stopped by the deeper snow there.

It wasn't even scary while it was happening; Jaela and Alexa also felt no panic, just a realization--"Oh, we're spinning." And it was over so fast I never had time to get scared. But then we saw the next car coming, and it was way scarier watching them; they were sliding too, just like us, and it was obvious the driver had no control over the car. They hit a guardrail on the left side, swerved back onto the road, and ended up crashing into a mailbox. Everyone was okay, but the front bumper of the car was messed up.

Fortunately the people in the third car saw us and stopped before they hit the slippery area. Someone went to tell the people in the house about their mailbox, and they came out to make sure we were okay and give us some advice--don't drive to Rochester today. The third car went back to Houghton, and pretty soon my car did too. But the other car was stuck and was going to have to be towed. That situation ended up being kind of complicated, because the girl who had been driving that car wasn't the owner, and she had to call the owner and tried to get everything sorted out. The owner wasn't sure if she had insurance for other drivers or not, and then they were having phone trouble . . . I don't know how all that got resolved, because we left before there was any conclusion to it.

Anyway, no one was hurt, but that certainly wasn't how I expected to spend my Sunday morning.