My sister kindly delayed celebrating Alex's birthday (April 1) until after tax season so that we could make it to Evansville to help him celebrate. NOTE: I didn't believe that she delayed it for me, but she swears she did so I'll roll with it and feel honored.
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| Mont and MacK |
She even lives close to a Donut Bank so we had a yummy breakfast on Saturday morning. We took a long walk around Evansville because it was a beautiful morning. We explored the University of Evansville's campus since Kathy lives near there now and I'd never been. It was cute! Then we headed out to celebrate Sir Alex turning 5! Can you believe he is 5?!
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| Birthday boy and his Mommy |
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| Playing with some friends |
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| Playing with Grandma and Grandpa Craig |
We left town on Sunday morning and were moving along the new stretch of Interstate 69 when the car in front of us crashed. We immediately stopped to see if the driver was OK as it was a pretty nasty crash and the airbags deployed. It was POURING down rain at this point and MacKenzie was in the back of the car just barking wondering what on earth was going on. He stumbled out of the car shaken and said he was doing fine. He had a black eye already forming, some cuts on his face and a gnarly gash on his leg, but he was walking just fine. We offered to call for help and he asked us to instead take him to a gas station. For whatever reason, that did not seem odd at the time.
Only it was odd. Very odd.
As we are driving towards the next exit we both realize that the guy we picked up, later revealed to be named Joel, was completely wasted. I mean smelled worse than a frat house on Saturday night wasted. We also soon remembered that the new stretch of interstate has no gas stations. We got off on the next exit and told him that there were no stations around and he'd need to call for help. Joel called his dad who was about 25 minutes away to come get him and kept assuring him that he was not in trouble. That was a lie. Driving drunk is no joke, Joel. I started getting more annoyed the more time I had to think about it. If he had been even a minute later losing control he would have hit our car at 75+ miles per hour. Jerk. He was so blitzed that he did not know we were ever traveling on the new interstate. We had to tell him 5 times where to tell his dad to come get him. He got out of the car at the exit and thanked us for the ride.
We started to drive away and realized that we'd accidentally helped him flee the scene of an accident. CRAP! I immediately called 911 to tell them what happened. Yes, they too thought we were idiots. Has no one ever heard of Good Samaritans?! Come on. We thought we were helping out a guy who had just been in a wreck. We weren't thinking that he was drunk or that he could have a weapon on him. Those thoughts came later. He seemed harmless, really. Just super drunk. Plus MacKenzie sat on his lap and he didn't even complain.
Law enforcement made us return to the scene of the accident sans Joel and explain what happened. They told us to not pick up strangers again and let us go on our way. It turns out Joel had a suspended license for, you guessed it, drunk driving so he was going to spending some time in the slammer. Poor guy clearly had a problem. I hope he gets some help. We decided that he was lucky to have been drunk because a sober person hitting that rail at that speed would have tensed up and really gotten hurt.
Note added: to add to the craziness of this event the first responders wrote Jackson up as the driver fleeing the scene and his license was to be suspended. That was nothing that a few hours on the phone with the BMV couldn't clear up. Ugh. No good deed goes unpunished!! ;)
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| This isn't a good shot of the wrecked car...the front was entirely gone! |
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