I think it is safe to assume that when most of us get behind the wheel of our vehicles we wholly expect that we will get to our final destination in one piece. In fact, many of us are probably so busy either trying to dodge traffic so we make it to said destination on time or are completely distracted by the ten million other mental notes we are formulating in our minds that the thought of NOT getting to work, school, the supermarket or the pediatrician never occurs to us.
Bottom line: Safe travel is something many of us take forgranted.
I reflected upon this fact as I was counting my Thanksgiving blessings. How many times do I get in my car and worry more about whether I will get a good parking spot at the grocery store (especially on days when we are experiencing inclement weather) than whether I will in fact make it from my garage to the grocery store at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not encouraging you to be paranoid about your driving techniques. I am simply suggesting that it is not a bad idea to pause for a moment and reflect on how blessed we are to travel the distances we do as frequently as we do on a daily basis… and survive.
I spent more than a decade as a TV news reporter. As such I often witnessed first hand the carnage left behind at car collisions, train derailments, airplane crashes, and vehicle vs. pedestrian accidents. Not only did I see the blood, the strewn glass, and tangled metal, but because of my job I had the horrific task of having to seek out the victim’s grieving family members and ask them to comment on camera about the incident. Without question it was the one part of my job that I despised the most. Having to query emotionally distraught family members and have them discuss the moms, dads, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters whose bodies were being extracted from mangled metal… yeah, I don’t miss that at all.
Likewise, one of my brothers is a firefighter in Hawaii. He too sees what can happen when family trips go terribly wrong. He has responded to countless travel-related incidents such as the mini van filled with a mom and her six children that rear ended a semi and burst into flames (no one survived); the father who was speeding down a rain slick street and ended up wrapping his convertible around a tree—-the impact sliced the car in half–and he and his 15-month-old son who was in an infant carrier, though it was not connected to the base, died at the scene; and the family of four who innocently set off on a roller blade trip around Waikiki and ended up becoming the target of a drunk driver (only two survived).
This Thanksgiving I remember the victims of every vehicular crash I have ever witnessed… and then some. I think of how the victims of the Interstate 35W crash in Minneapolis who were simply trying to get home from work (probably wondering if they had remembered to thaw out the chicken for dinner) when the concrete bridge they crossed everyday gave out beneath them and sent their cars plummeting into the Mississippi River.
I am so thankful that every time I strap my daughter into her carseat that I am able to unstrap her when we get to our final destination.
And I’m sure every parent who allows his or her child to get on a school bus driven by a complete stranger or even into a car driven by a carpooling friend is thankful today for safe travel.
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Are You A Superstitious Traveler?