everyone loves the noo-noo

[dragonlady7]

Day was nice.
Saw Letchworth.
Did some hikin'.
Dave wouldn't ride the ponies. So sad. I wanted to go horsey-riding.

I totally want to go camping there in the winter. There are cabins there and they rent them out by the day or week. Some of them are available year-round. Cheaper in the winter, and nobody's there, and the gorge freezes over, and there's tons of hiking and snowshoeing and so on to do. It would be such a blast.

Afterward we went to Dave's professor's house for a party. Dave said the event was at 7 pm. I said, repeatedly, 'are you sure?' It struck me as odd that a person who lived in the middle of nowhere, nearly 45 minutes out of Rochester, would have a buffet-picnic-thing start at 7 pm. It seemed wrong. He said he was going to call her. He never did.
So we arrived at 6:30, having meant to take a more scenic route but having missed the turn, so we were early.

There was a whole line of cars already parked there. "Are you sure she said 7:00?" I said one last time. "Well," Dave hemmed. We went inside.

5:00. She'd said 5:00.

Oh well. We stayed until 10:30 anyway.

The drive back to Buffalo took 2 hours. Would have been a little less, but coming along 20a near Liecester, the car ahead of us rear-ended the car ahead of it when the first car stopped dead to avoid hitting a posse of raccoons.
Dave stopped in plenty of time, and I had him pull over. I hopped out, grabbing the flashlight, and ran up to see if anyone was hurt.
The first car contained two teenage girls and a teenage boy. The second car contained a teenage girl and her young teenage sister. I swear not one person there was older than 19.
Nobody was hurt, though one of the girls in the first car had hit her head and had a bump on it.
None of them had ever been in an accident before. Two of them were crying, one of them was shaking, the driver of the second car was quietly freaking out, staring at her detached bumper and repeating " I just got this truck last week. I just got this truck. It's brand new. I just got this truck." I instructed them to call 911 and summon the police. I asked each of them if they could find their registration and insurance card. One of them looked blankly at me and said, "my what?" The other one said, "the car's new. i don't have the insurance card yet."
I used the flashlight to check if either car was leaking fluids. Neither one was. I got them to turn off their engines and Dave put on his flashers.
A neighbor came out, and I gave him my flashlight so he could clear the debris from the driving lanes of the road. He lit flares, and we waited for the cops.
"I just got this car," the driver of the second car said.
We detached her bumper the rest of the way so it wasn't protruding into the driving lane.
The cops showed up, and they had flashlights, so I asked them if I could go, and once they realized I wasn't involved at all, they let me go.

The others were all locals. And nobody was hurt. If I were the cops, i wouldn't ticket the driver of the second car, because the first one had stopped dead in a driving lane with no outward indication of why, and so it was perfectly reasonable that the following car wouldn't have realized that she had come to a complete stop, as she had been slowing down before. But she didn't explain herself very well, so I think she might end up getting a ticket.

I don't know; I didn't get anybody's name, and I'll never see those people again. But the cops thanked me for stopping.

I felt like such a geezer.

The driver of the second car finally varied her refrain about the car, to say "And I was almost home, too."

Yes, I too know the bitterness of having an accident when you've almost made it home. But that was a long time ago, and nobody was hurt then either.

All's well that ends well.

The only downer for us, really, besides sympathy for the little girls, was that all that idling brought Dave's mileage down from 50.1 miles per gallon back down to 50.0.
But, it went back up to 50.1 before we got home, so that's all right.