The worst day ever...
Today I wish I would have just stayed in bed all day long! That way I could have avoided the worst day ever and happily moved on with my life. But no....This is what happened:
This morning I was driving my mum and P-O up to Stansted Airport to catch a plane to sunny Spain. Everything goes smoothly on the way up and with a wave goodbye I'm on my way back home again. After about 10 min in the car I'm swishing down the M11 motorway doing a nice +70 mph = +110km/h. All of a sudden the car in front off me drives over like a metal plate or metal cover that flies up in the air behind it. It is approximately 1m * 0.75m in size and It has been hit a couple of times so has been bent and has some sharp edges. By now it is to late for me to swerve into the other lane cause there is quite a lot of traffic so my only option is to go straight over it. It doesn't feel like the best surface to be driving on and I get a slight panic that I'm going to puncture a tire. 10 meters later I calm down because the tires all seem ok and I'm good to go! So I bring the car up to a good 85 mph and continue my journey!
30 min later I get to a big queue to the roundabout that will lead me on to the A12 road. The queue is over 2 lanes and very slow. All of a sudden I realise that a van next to me has backed up all the traffic in his lane so I look over and he is waving like a crazy person at me! I get my window down and he shouts over: "your car is leaking petrol, pull over, pull over!" So I look in the rear view mirror and see this long trail of petrol behind the car. The panic all of a sudden starts to build up and all I want to do is get out of the car and get as far away from it as I possibly can in case it catches on fire and takes me along with it...
I'm sitting there in a queue on the motorway with no idea what I'm supposed to do. I can't pull over cause there is no where to go so I keep going until I get to the roundabout and then take the first exit and finally find a quiet street I can park on and call a recovery van. I sit down at a safe distance from the car while a persistent stream of petrol is leaking out of the hole and it only takes around 20 min to empty all the petrol on to the street where it is starting to melt away the tarmac. I and wait for almost 2 hours for the recovery van to reach me and when it gets there it's a really nice guy called Lawrence that brightens up my day. He has a look around and under and finally has to tow it to an Audi garage in the Docklands. On the way there Lawrence feeds me sweets and biscuits that he has in his van and we chat about random breakdowns he has been dealing with lately. When we get to the Audi garage they guys push the car in because it is too dangerous to start. I get told that I was very lucky and I guess that is when I realise that a tiny little spark or a cigarette bud or anything that would have lit the fumes could have very abruptly ended my life on this earth....
I finally get on the train back towards home, but decide to get off at Greenwich to go in to work, which is were I was supposed to be by then anyway, and when I get to the top of the escalators I see the ticket checkers standing there. Because of the stress of the day I forgot to buy a ticket before I got on the DLR (train) so that ended up costing me £25...
The day is not over yet and so far there has only been 2 bad things and they always come in 3 so bring on the last one and get it over with...
