White-tail deer hunting season has once again found us making our way into the woods of northern Michigan. Once again the headline to this entry is going to be about the weather. The trip up to our hunting camp was uneventful except for a little mud along the way. The return trip home was yet another story.
The hunt was successful, with both of my sons getting a doe each. I on the other hand saw several deer the day before the opening of the season and then saw nothing else following that day. That was to be just the beginning of my luck.
Then it was time to travel home. This is when the REAL story begins. The weather was just at the freezing mark creating “Black Ice” conditions on many of the roads throughout the state. My oldest son decided to drive his girlfriend home in her truck and leave his pickup to be driven home by my youngest son, who had not experienced the thrill of driving a small pickup on the ice. That was until now. The first bridge he came to sent him into a tailspin with an oncoming car just nearly missing him before he spun uncontrollably into the ditch. My wife saw everything from the rear view mirror in her car.
She leaped from her vehicle to check on my son. She then proceeded to make calls to both my oldest son and myself. We were both ahead of them on our way home at this point. I pulled off the road into a parking lot, dropped the 5th wheel off and headed back to help pull my son out of the ditch.
I arrived at the scene and hooked the tow strap up to the back of my 4×4 pickup. As I was pulling the smaller truck out of the ditch, an oncoming car started to spin out of control coming across the bridge at us. As this occurred, a full sized truck plowed into the side of this small car. This action caused every airbag in the small vehicle to be deployed and then the car hit an embankment along the side of the road. My wife checked on the condition of those involved in the accident as I got my son back on the road. When we found everyone to be alright, I insisted that we had to leave. At this point, we were sitting ducks for the next spinning vehicle to come hurling over the bridge at us.
We headed back to the trailer to hook it back up. This is when my oldest son met up with us. He informed us that he had experienced the same spinning sensation coming across that same bridge earlier in the day.
On the normally 3 hour ride home we saw several accidents along the way, some of them quite bad. We saw lots of vehicles in ditches and a few over-turned vehicles as well. The later it got the more police vehicles we saw trying to slow people down. We got almost home to find that the expressway was closed at the last bridge we had to cross. We were directed through the median to the other side of the expressway and turned back. Traffic was backed up for miles. People were getting off at the first exit they came to and I saw several maps coming out. Most people were totally confused as to what they were going to do now.
Since we were close to home at this point, we knew how to get around the accident. We arrived home nearly 6 hours after we started. We were REALLY glad to be home!