Oh! The Excitement of the Evening!

As I was tucking dh into bed this evening (OK, everyone, on 3–1, 2, 3: how cute!), we heard a tremendous crash.  We live somewhat near 2 intersections, one of which has vehicles flying down a hill trying to make a light.  At night, sound can carry, so we thought maybe there was a crash there.  I went to one of our back windows to look out at our main neighborhood entry intersection to see if I could see anything there, because after all, who isn’t a looky-loo?  Nope, all’s quiet there and I can’t see the lighted intersection from our house.  I do see a small car driving off, but it’s driving normal speed and using it’s turn signals (rare).  So I wonder to dh if someone ran into a pile of landscaping rocks left in the street in front of our neighbor’s house; they had about 5 tons dropped yesterday and had moved most of it onto their property today, but a smallish 2.5 foot tall pile was still left.  It’s quite visible and lit by a street lamp.

Curiosity got the better of me and I put on a coat and went outside to see what happened.  Not only did someone hit the pile of rocks, but they topped out on it.  In their effort to get unstuck, they gunned the engine (which accounted for what sounded to me like the vehicle being upside down with the wheels spinning–I’m telling you it sounded like a major crash at 10:30 at night), got unstuck, and rammed the back end of our neighbor’s truck that was completely in their driveway.  Then they took off.  Damage to the truck was deceptively minor: the back right wheel is at an odd angle and there is some damage to the back right fender, but that’s it.  I can hear them out there at 11:45p shoveling rocks, poor things–they’re everywhere.

The lady of the house got in her van and drove off tracking after the leaking fluids, lol.  She came back briefly to get her shoes and a coat, but thought it would be easy to pick up the trail again as we waited for the police to arrive.  How long can a vehicle drive without fluids anyway?  I personally think it was a teenager who got scared.  We have plenty of those around in this neighborhood.  I happen to know one very well who hit a parked car 6 weeks after getting her driver’s license and making that call home was evil. I also now think it was the car I saw from my window driving out of the neighborhood.

It wasn’t until after I wished my neighbors well and told them that really, this stuff doesn’t happen often in this neighborhood (they moved in last year and have had some bad things happen to them already–we need good folks to stay in our neighborhood, not be run out!) and was inside thawing out in front of my personal heater that I thought about the damage to the other car.  Hello!  What kind of geek am I?  Argh!  It hit the truck hard enough to change its position nearly perpendicular to where it was parked–the airbags *must* have gone off!  It should have been hard to drive the car with deployed airbags, right?  I’ll see them tomorrow at the kids’ school and follow up.  Nothing like some good old fashioned night-time fun to get the blood pumping at bedtime 😉 .