Yet Another Reason to Wear Your Seatbelt!

Well, Niall and I had a little adventure today! First let me give you the background...it has been raining cats and dogs here so all the roads are amazingly bad (as opposed to just their normal awful). Yesterday when I drove home during a deluge there were waterfalls of muddy water plunging off the hillsides onto the road. Additionally drain pipes from all the homes that border the road were spewing water out like someone had turned so many giant water faucets. When it rains this hard the water all runs down the roads and into the stream beds...often eroding away the road and undercutting it where the water plunges down into the frothy rivers below.

So today it wasn't raining so hard, and I was driving home after a lovely lunch with a grandmother and her granddaughter who are taking my Spanish class with me. As I came up to the turnoff for our road, Niall's bus pulled up, so I pulled off the road at the intersection to wait for him.

Niall comes racing up and hops in the back of the our giant SUV which has pull down seats in the back. We're all of 500 yards from home up a steep, dirt road with a max possible speed of about 10 mph, so I'm not asking him to put his seat belt on. After he hops in, I pull out and to the right to turn up our steep road. Since I was already pulled off to the right side of the road, I'm a little off the road and the wheels are in a kind of a swale where the water flows down into the smallish stream that flows directly under the road I'm going up.

As I start to pull out into the road and go up, two tourist vans are coming down the road and a motorcycle is passing them, so I had to move over a bit. As I do this, I feel the slightest bump, and I'm thinking that my back wheel has just slipped back down into the swale.....but the car won't move forward. Because my attention is focused on avoiding the motorcycle, I'm not really aware that I'm actually over the stream now, not the swale. Anyway, I'm a little confused as to why the wheel is spining and since Niall is in the far back, I ask him to open up the back door and tell me what he sees. "Ah, Mom...all I see is stream!"

Only then do I realize that perhaps we're in some trouble and we get out of the car. When I go around the back I realize that the stream embankment has given way and my rear wheel is hanging out over an 8 foot drop down to the stream bed below! The car is perilously close to just tipping in and over!

Of course, my predicament at this fairly busy corner attracts a number of gawkers and, as luck would have it, our cheerful, handsome mechanic Arnoldo. My lucky day! In short order, Arnoldo has commandeered a big chain from one friend driving by and a cell phone from another and within 10 minutes he has summoned the giant road work back hoe to pull us out! I could have kissed him!

Of course I was sweating it as we've already taken a deposit on the car and we're just using it for the next two weeks. I could just imagine what Scott would say if he found the car upside down in the stream bed...or how Niall would have fared as we rolled over and down without his seatbelt on.

I have no doubt that Scott will hear of our little adventure even before he comes home tonight. Of course we were quite the "show" for a few minutes there, with everyone driving slowly by and shaking their heads. It was funny...all the women drove by slowly, but all the men, to a one, stopped, offered help and then proceeded to recount the last time that someone had overturned into that stream bed. Now that I can comprehend a fair bit of Spanish, their stories were getting me a little anxious, as the car looked like it was going to tip at any second!

I'm now sitting home safe and sound, and very thankful. Niall has taken great glee in reminding me that he told me we were in a really bad spot before I asked him to, "Just open the back door and take a look."