For as long as I can remember co-workers have told me that the stories I have shared sound sensational (e.g. they don’t believe me or think I am joking!); that’s why I started this blog post with the title I did (who has not heard a joke that starts that way!?).
Well this weekend we had another one of those “experiences”, my son Andrew was away at summer camp in Squamish, BC at a place called Camp Summit; it’s a neat camp with Hiking, Biking, Canoeing, Archery, amongst other things.
If you map the distance between our home and the camp it shows its about 3 hours, but with the border controls being tightened up its more like 2x that; or at least that’s what we found out when we dropped him off with that lessoned learned we decided to head out a day earlier and sleep in Squamish so we could pick him up in the morning (did not want to be late to pick him up).
With that goal in mind I booked a night at the Howe Sound Inn & Brewing Company they are about a 10 minute drive from the camp and it looked like a neat place to have dinner and spend a night; we left at 4:30PM on Friday and manage to get in the middle of Vancouver around 11PM (Squamish is about a hour past Vancouver).
While driving through Vancouver we ended up being rear-ended, specifically what happened was we stopped at red-light behind one other car, another car stopped behind us when the light turned green the car in front of us pulled slightly into the intersection with its turn signal on so it could turn left and the car right behind us accelerated into the back of our car. It hit us pretty hard, I got out, stepped around the back to see the damage and to talk to the woman driving the car behind us.
As I approached the woman’s window she stepped out of the car and started to say how sorry she was, repeating over and over that she thought we were going; I then told her that we should exchange information because my car was damaged and she agreed, and then suggested we pull over to the side of the road so we could do so safely I agreed (fool heartedly), I got back into the car and we pulled over to the side but the woman was nowhere to be found, a witness came up to us and told us that she saw the whole exchange and indicated as we were pulling over the woman took off down the street “like a woman running away from something…”.
I called the police, they made a record of the incident and supposedly sent a notification out to the police cars in the area asking them to look for the car but I did not get the license plate number so that was a complete shot in the dark; the woman I filed the report with also told me I would need to come back the next day to get the supporting paperwork, she gave us the address and we planned on stopping back the next day.
The next day came, we managed to make it to the address we were given to “finish” the report to the police but they were closed, thanks to my smartphone I was able to find another address we could go to that was not to far away but it was in a pretty shady part of town, after managing to find parking we went in and finished the report, got our paperwork and headed out.
The thing that bothers me the most about this event was not the accident, these things happen but that I was fooled, that the trust I extended was miss-placed; I am by my very nature not a trusting person and when I do extend trust to a new person I get burned it just doesn’t make you want to trust humanity.
I guess the next thing that gets my goat is I did not get to have the night out with my wife at the Inn we had planned on, these sorts of opportunities don’t present themselves too often and this accident stole that from us.
In any event, this finishes the weekly installment of the Young and the Restless drama that is my life J