Keep your eyes open!! Literally!

  It was a Sunday, in September of 1978.  We were driving home from our vacation through Pennsylvania.  The evening was late (because we spent 3 hours in Pizza Hut earlier that evening not getting our pizza!)   Mostly, though, it was particularly dark and so foggy that you couldn’t see anything past the windshield.  We were looking out at a sheet of cloud cover sitting over our little vehicle and the headlights were reflecting back and completely useless.  Both Mark and I had to work the next morning so we were determined to make it home that night.  I remember being very, very tired.  Mark was the only one that could drive the car because it was a stick shift and I had no idea about driving such things.  I felt bad for the guy because he was driving and driving and driving and I was dozing off and on.  You know when you’re really tired and trying to stay awake so your head does that bobbing thing?  Well that’s what I was doing.  I kept waking up and looking over at Mark and mumbling, “Are you ok?  Are you still awake?” And he would assure me he was fine and awake, go back to sleep.  We had about three hours left to drive home to Liverpool.  I finally fell into a very deep sleep.  I was a little bit dreaming and a little bit awake when my body became aware of being shaken around.  I could feel myself being jostled back and forth.  Slowly I opened my eyes and was suddenly aware of my surroundings.  Do you remember the scene in the Chevy Chase Movie, “Vacation,” when the camera pans to Audrey and Rusty (the children) sleeping in the back seat and then slowly moves to the front seat and Ellen (the wife) is out cold, and then, Clark (the driver) is sound asleep behind the wheel of the car as it is careening off an embankment?  Well, I woke up and the car was completely off the road and we were very quickly going through a field and over some underbrush and rubble.  I turned to look at Mark in a panic and he was completely sound asleep with his foot on the accelerator!!!!  I mean, his head was back, his mouth was open, and he was snoring!!!  I screamed a blood curdling scream and he woke up startled and said “What??”  He realized what I was screaming about and turned the car back toward the road.  We clumped back through the field, over the embankment and then onto the road.  We sat there in shock that we lived through that experience.  We decided to pull over at the next rest stop and take 15 or 20 minutes to have a little nap.  The adrenaline we had coursing through our veins for that little jaunt kept us awake for the next 30 minutes until we could pull over.  It was a very good lesson to learn that driving and sleeping are not good combinations!!  It did make us realize that little things like uncooked pizza pales in comparison to cars going off the road!!