Today, we are gonna take a minute to look back on my driving history and laugh at my expense. My friends like to poke fun at me and say that I am a bad driver because of the trail of crumpled aluminum I have left behind me, but – while I know I am no Danica Patrick, if you pay attention, you will find the most catastrophic incidents of my past were not the fault of mine.

I got my licence when I was eighteen years old. A little late to the party, sure, but I was thrilled to finally drive, nonetheless.

My first car was both a surprise and not a surprise. On one hand, I knew that my parents were looking; my dad works at a Toyota dealership and for some time leading up to my drivers exam, he was keeping an eye on the used department for something reliable and inexpensive. I was to pay for my first vehicle to learn personal responsibility, and my parents wanted me to be aware of that before a car was found. However, I was surprised when I got my first car.

One evening, my parents brought me out to the garage to reveal to me my first car. It was a periwinkle-blue 1999 Nissan Altima that I later would name Ol’ Reliable – ironically. I was ecstatic about it. Fortunately, it was purchased before my exam, so I was able to drive my own car the first day I had my licence.

My sister and I got our licences on the same day, but she had yet to have a vehicle of her own at that time. Circumstances, or whatever. She joined me in my passenger seat for my first ever drive with a permit that did not require other licensed supervision, and we… felt…. alive.

Ol’ Reliable always seemed to have something wrong with it. While I cannot seem to recall any of its imperfections, I do remember that they never bothered me. A first car, I thought, was meant to have its quirks and clanks and so every new rattle or mishap just seemed to feel right. If anything, they brought me a silly sort of joy.

The very first accident I was in was my fault. See, I got my license on October 9^th 2012 and I live where winters are harsh, cold, icy, and wild. I got my license just as snow was beginning to fall and being immediately thrown into unpredictable weather was going to be a gigantic learning curve for me.

So, my first accident went a little something like this:

A young girl, (me) barely a few months into driving approached a deceivingly slippery intersection. The light ahead of her (me) abruptly changed from a happy green to an eerie, foreshadowing amber and I hit my brakes. I was stunned as I realized my car was not coming to a slow, and then, an angry red light was screaming at me to stop! Traffic in the perpendicular direction had the happy green light that by then, I greatly longed for, and to my dismay, I was headed straight for a semi truck who was inching his way through the intersection right in my path ahead. Yikes.

I laid on my horn as to warn the poor fellow I was destined to collide with, but it was no use. At the pace of a snail, helpless and embarrassed, I watched as Ol’ Reliable’s poor face smashed into the side of the very large truck. I felt very, very small.

I remained in my seat as the truck driver stormed out of his truck in a fit of rage! He barreled towards me and in a booming voice, decorated my poor eighteen-year-old ear holes with colorful language in a string of slurs I had never thought could be strung together. In a gap between what could only be followed with more angry words, I tried to make myself speak. To my surprise, my cracking voice squeaked at a fraction of a decibel, “would you like to have my information?”

His answer was yes.

We do not have to go through with explaining how he answered, yes, all that needs to be known is that in fact, his answer was yes.

He walked away to cool himself off and to inspect the damage, and I scrambled to shuffle through the papers in my glove box to find what he would need. Amidst my scrambling, I heard a tiny knock on my window-pane. I turned and was greeted again with the trucker’s face, now smiling.

“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t need your information.”

He must have cooled off a lot. He must have noticed that there was zero damage to his behemoth of a vehicle while mine, well… my driver’s side headlight was exposed and dangling by the wires.

He must have taken pity on the tiny little girl behind the wheel of a 1999 Nissan Altima on a brisk winter afternoon.

I am still grateful that he changed his mind.

I got to keep my Altima for a little over a year. There is, in fact, an “until” coming.

My sister and I had been in swimming lessons for most of our lives. My mom wanted to teach us the value of completing something we have begun, and so, even though neither her nor I had any interest in pursuing a career as a life guard, my mom insisted that we got our lifeguard certificates, and so, at seventeen and nearly nineteen years old, kicking off February of 2013, we were thrown back into swimming lessons.

We were taking either the Bronze Star or the Bronze Medallion program, I no longer remember which comes first. The lessons were on weekends every weekend for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a month or so. I drove my sister and I to our lessons, week after week, and because I am not a morning person, we were consistently and notoriously late. This, of course, drove our instructor crazy.

One morning in particular, we were heading into our lessons as usual and if memory serves me correctly, we were actually due to make it on time that day. However, make it on time we did not.

So, there we were, a little past the half way mark to our destination, approaching a red light. This one was not angry nor was it yelling at me. I was able to stop with ease.

Once again comforted with the happy green light, I expected to go with ease as well. But alas, my car had other plans.

My sister turned to me, “go,” she said. “It’s green.”

“I’m trying,” I said back. I was trying.

Oh no.

My little blue car, it just would not go.

I called my mom and asked her what I should do. She instructed me to leave my keys on my car seat and ask the next nearby driver for a ride to the pool. She said that her and dad would handle my car, and that it was to be mine and my sister’s priority to make it to our class. Fortunately, when I peered into my rear-view mirror, I saw a semi truck. Semi trucks are apparently a prominent pawn in my car mishaps.

Anyway, I jumped out of my car and hurried over to the tall driver’s side door. I was greeted by two men sitting in the truck, and I asked in a tiny voice if they wouldn’t mind driving my sister and I to the pool. I explained to them how my car stopped going.

To my surprise, they agreed. When looking back, I see that there were a bunch of choices made that day that should not have been made, but this is what happened, and that is that.

I left my hot pink Tinkerbell lanyard on my driver’s seat, and my sister and I crawled into the cab of the gigantic truck.

The semi did not have any back seats, of course, and there were only three available seats (and seatbelts) up front, so things got pretty squishy. My sister got into the truck first, placing her between myself and the strangers, and I was pressed up against the passenger side door for the duration of the ride. At one point, we approached a left-hand turn. As the driver made his way through the turn, the passenger door that apparently had not latched all the way swung wide open. I was not wearing a seat belt, because of course there was an non-equivalent passenger-to-seatbelt ratio and with how compact we were in the truck, there was no hope of trying to click one into place, so when the door opened, I nearly fell out of the truck!
We finally made it to the pool, and as we entered the room our class was being taught in, our instructor quickly turned to us, and her face told me she was ready to scold us for being late once again.

I explained, probably far too fast, that my car had died in the middle of the road. My sister and I walked the class through all the events that had just unfolded, and by the end of the story, we had every student in a roaring laughter. Our instructor empathized with us, understood our troubles, and was very amused by our story, so we earned her forgiveness that day.

That was the day my 1999 Nissan Altima decided it did not want to live on this planet anymore. It was looked at by a mechanic, and he deemed it a write-off. I am sure at some point it was explained to me exactly what happened with it, but I have long since forgotten. As far as I am concerned, it just decided one day to give up. “Enough is enough,” Ol’ Reliable whispered to himself before gently drifting off into a forever slumber.

It took a very long two or three months for me to find another reliable and inexpensive car. I was reintroduced to being chauffeured around by my parents, and after growing accustomed to my independence, I found it significantly more frustrating than I ever had in the past. Funny how perspective can change so much in such a short amount of time.

Finally, the right opportunity for a vehicle that fit my needs came a-knockin’ when my dad’s co-worker decided to independently sell his 1999 special edition Toyota Solara after having stored it in his garage for many years.

Yes, at the bright young age of nineteen, the “special edition” title tagged onto my Solara made me feel very fancy. I would only be drinking tea with my pinky up from that day forth.

My Solara was shiny, eggshell white with a leather beige interior, and I called her my Aluminum Stallion.

Honestly, two things I would never go out of my way to choose for myself as far as vehicle preferences go are a white exterior and a beige interior, but somehow, it just worked with my Solara.

Like most of my vehicles, my Solara came with its own variety of problems and hurdles. The most annoying being that the car alarm would sound at any moment, and the only way my vehicle would respond to shutting it off is if I did so via the key fob button. Now, for the most part, this problem was not so much of a hassle, but it particularly was an issue one day while I was at work when my alarm went off after the batteries in my key fob had died. It was a long shift.

There was another instance where my car alarm sounded with no hope of turning it off while I was on a drive. I was serenaded by the sweet, monotone sounds of my own horn for a full thirty minute drive.

Another testy moment was with my first boyfriend who was in my passenger seat while I was driving us back to my parent’s home. He decided for some unruly reason that a harsh, cold winter day was the appropriate time to randomly open the passenger side window. What neither of us anticipated, though, was that my car would also decide that was the day it did not care to allow the window to roll back up. We sat frozen, side by side, in thick frustration for the entire twenty-minute duration of our drive, but that is not the best part.

At one point, he convinced me to also try my window to see if it was a problem on both sides. Turns out, it was. Fortunately, I had the foresight to only roll mine a third of the way down, unlike his, which was as wide open as a window can be.

Besides the occasional disruptive kinks, my Solara was a wonderful car for me at the time. It drove like a dream and it felt soothing to sit in. I got to keep it for just over a year.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Because I am starting to see a pattern here.

Let us fast forward to early July of 2014. At the time, I was working a night shift job and just before the crack of dawn on the 6^th, I left work and was heading home.

If you have read my other posts, you will know that I grew up on an acreage, and if you grew up on an acreage yourself, you are probably very aware of how frustratingly annoying a deer can be for a driver. Many a time leading up to this day, I had to slam on my brakes, honk, and sometimes even swerve to avoid colliding with one of the fellow idiots on hooves. Unfortunately on this day, I wasn’t granted a big enough cushion of time to be warned about my soon-to-be incident with a wannabe horse, stubby-tailed, skinny-faced, awkward and clumsy, can’t-choose-between-fight-or-flight, furry foe.

So, there I was, early on July sixth, humbled in my car under the first looming beams of sunlight, not a care in the world. I was singing along gleefully to Judas Priest cranked to full blast, the 10”, aging sub booming from under the back seats, expecting to get home briskly and without woe. When suddenly, and I mean suddenly, a deer darts out from the dense array of trees to my right. I had scarce time to react and only managed to hit my brakes hard enough to get me to 50% of my original speed. The deer, by then, saw the danger of my car growing nearer, and its reaction…

Friends,

Its reaction was to jump straight up, twist the entirety of its body sideways, and land ribcage first atop the hood of my car.

This absolutely needs to be noted: judging from the trajectory and speed of the deer’s original line of direction, it had more than enough time and opportunity to get out of my way. Instead, it chose to land. On. My. Car. And then scamper off back into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Shocked and disheartened, I drove the remaining seven minutes home in near silence – the only sound being the new clattering that came somewhere from the front of my car. I did not even get out to take a look at the damage before I left. I just determinedly, and probably ignorantly made it my goal to make it to my driveway. I then calmly got out of my car, looked at my hood, felt my stomach drop, took a picture, and crawled into bed making it tomorrow’s problem.

For the second time in my driving life, I was without a car. This time, only for twenty days.

This brings me to the car that I loathed with every fibre of my being: my jet black 2004 Oldsmobile Alero. What an ugly looking car.

Living on an acreage and having a job provides a lot of urgency to have a vehicle once you have become accustomed to that life. It became a priority for me to get one as soon as something was available. My parents worked opposing schedules, both of which conflicted with mine, so it was a frustrating mess for all of us during the time I did not have one. My family and I were all frequenting Kijiji until something came along. That is when my dad stumbled upon the ugly little beast.

I did not like the look of it on sight. Truly, there are few cars that are more hideous. However, because the urgency to get a set of wheels was greater and I felt sort of backed into a corner, I agreed to the sale.

I bought the Alero for $5000.

Five. Thousand. Dollars.

There is not an Alero on Earth that is worth that many dollars, and that is something I am truly certain about.

As tradition would have it, I named my Alero, too. My first idea was Black Beauty, but it was undeserving of the title, so instead I switched it to Black Betty.

The longer I had my Alero for, the more I hated it. Here are some things that were wrong with it:

There were a few months in the winter where the heat did not work, and a few months in the summer where the A/C failed as well.

Once in the winter during the time that it was heatless, I was on my way to town to visit my sister. About half way there, my windshield started freezing up, so every two to three minutes for the remainder of the drive, I would have to stop and get out of my car, scrape off the new layer of ice that formed on the glass, and drive as far as I could while I could still see.

Sometimes, the gear selector would get stuck in park. The longest it was stuck in park was for about forty-five minutes outside a gas station pump.

Sometimes, the key just would not turn in the ignition. It would just decide, “nah, not today.”

There was a leak in the container that held the windshield wiper fluid, so fluid would only be in my car for a maximum of three days, which surprisingly lasted me longer than a full tank of gas, that would only last me two whole days if I were lucky.

Get this: it had a recall that stated any time the car was in motion, there was a chance that my key could randomly fall out of my ignition and my car would instantly turn off and stop. That is probably safe.

It did have the best winter tires I had ever experienced, though. Arctic Claws. 10/10 recommend. It seemed I could stop with the same ease as a dry summer day while the vehicles around me skated by on the slipperiest of ice.

Well, except this one time.

I was on my way to my piano lesson at my teacher’s house in the small town nearest to my home. My teacher’s neighborhood was always particularly icy, and I knew this, so I approached the neighborhood going at about 30km/h. Then, I had to turn into her neighborhood. As I said, I was already going 30km/h but I slowed down even more to make the turn I was approaching, so when I say I was crawling, I mean I was crawling.

I hit a patch of ice, and my car skidded sideways. There was nothing I could do. It was the slowest accident I had ever been in. I swear I could have had time to get out of my car, do a lap around it, get back into the driver’s side door, and buckle up before I collided with anything. What was to happen next was completely out of my control. On ice that slick, steering, and brakes are irrelevant. I just watched with stress and anticipation as my car slowly slid into a Pontiac Grand Am parked on the side of the road.

I hesitantly got out to see the mess that I had just created, and I discovered my passenger side side-view mirror was dangling by a thread, hanging weakly against the side of my car.

The Pontiac, however, unscathed. Still, I decided to be a good person and I knocked on the door of the house it was parked nearest to. Timidly, I explained the events that just unfolded to the middle-aged gentleman that greeted me at the door. He came out of his house to take a peek and after a good once-around, he turned to me and said, “you know what, this is my daughter’s car, so I don’t care anyway. Have yourself a good day.”

What?

Okay.

I mean, there was literally zero damage but, like…. Okay.

That was not the only time my Alero got to play bumper cars though. In the summer, I was working for a landscaping company and we stopped at the Canadian Brewhouse for a bite to eat. As I was leaving the parking lot, I was stuck behind a small row of vehicles waiting at a stop sign. A woman had just entered the car parked beside me, and I guess she decided to blindly back out because I was stopped behind her car for a full solid minute, and she still decided to slam the back of her beater right into the side of mine.

She was shocked by what had just occurred, and I still have trouble figuring out how it could have possibly happened. She was very obviously afraid and since I did not care for that car anyway, I just laughed and shrugged it off and let her carry on her merry way. My passenger side door did not open all the way for a while after, but whatever. It was the least of my concerns when it came to that car.

My Alero was my only vehicle to date (besides my current, so far) that did not end up as a write off. In fact, I sold it. For $500.

I sold it for a tenth of what I bought it for.

You wanna know a little something about heartache? Ouch.

Without further ado, this brings me to the absolute best car I have ever owned. My 2005 Toyota Celica GTS. I named her Belle, because – well, duh. She was a beaut. Black exterior, leather interior, fancy little sunroof, my first standard vehicle, and my first vehicle with heated seats. Game changer.

The whole time I got to have the Celica, it never had a single issue. Not a clank nor a rattle. Nary a clunk nor a squeak. I can not express to you how much I absolutely adored that car.

My parents have a friend that flips cars and he posted a picture on his Facebook while I had my Alero. My parents were very aware of my hatred for that car, so Mom showed me the photo of the Celica, knowing that I would fall in love with the aesthetic and personality of the little black machine. I needed it, and with the help of my parents, I got it.

At the time, I was in a new relationship and naturally, I was eager to get back to my boyfriend. I had not driven stick since I was in my mom’s Corolla with my learner’s permit at fourteen or fifteen years old, and my parents wanted me to be comfortable with a manual before I took off again. I went to a nearby parking lot and practised going in and out of first gear until it felt natural. I then went on a few loser laps until I felt I could prove my abilities to my parents. My dad sat in my passenger seat for a quick jaunt and then made the executive decision that I was ready to tackle the world in it, and off I went.

Standard was a learning curve. Here is another fun, quick story. In the city, there is a really tall hill that, on the day I went to drive up it for the first time in a manual, seemed like it was at a 90-degree angle. I could not get the timing right between releasing the clutch and applying the brake, so whenever I tried to go forward, my car would stall, and I would roll backwards. Being at the heart of the city, I felt a lot of pressure to succeed in my attempts to get up the hill, but of course having the pressure on me just made matters worse, elevating the difficulty in my tries.

Suddenly, I saw blue and red lights from behind me. I remained where I was as the police car drove up beside me. I rolled down my window and the officer rolled down his. He asked me what was happening, and I explained to him my struggles in as little detail as I could to try and convey as much as I could while shouting at him from inside my car. The officer was very kind and understanding. He positioned himself back behind my car to create a sort of roadblock while I figured my life out. Having him there must have been super reassuring because of course, I got the timing right my very next try, and I made it up the hill.

Hilarious.

Much like every car that came before my wonderful angel of a Celica, I only got to keep Belle for about a year. My heart is still broken about it.

One clear, summer day… not a cloud to be seen in the sky, not a gust of wind, but just the merriest of summer days, I was minding my own business, driving myself to work. I took the same usual slender highway I had always taken. The highway was one lane in either direction, very flat, and very straight. For most of the drive on it, you can see a long way ahead of you.

On this particular summer day, (August 22^nd, 2017) a team of workers were doing construction up ahead on the highway. Traffic had come to a complete stand-still for as far as the eye could see. Of course, given the weather conditions and the structure of the road, I could see the stopped traffic ahead of me for quite some time. Mildly annoyed that I was going to be late, I conformed to the traffic ahead and I, myself, came to a stop, and waited patiently. I must have been stopped for a full solid minute when suddenly, and unexpectedly, I felt the car behind me collide with mine. I kept my foot firmly pressed on the brake, hoping that I would not also bump into the truck I was parked behind, but alas it was no use. My poor beautiful Celica sat there squished in a sandwich between the two vehicles. The cherry on top of the cake was that the car that hit me was an Oldsmobile Alero. A beige Oldsmobile Alero, so not only the vehicle that I had despised the most, but an uglier version of the one I had previously owned. What have I ever done to deserve such karma?

There were two ladies in the Alero that hit me. They both claimed that they did not see me stopped up ahead until it was too late. How?

I am taking a deep breath in…. and I am just letting it roll off my shoulders.

The truck that I smashed into had little-to-no damage, so the driver decided to scurry away while the Alero ladies and I waited for the cops to arrive. The cops and my parents, who I had called to pick me up.

I called my boss and explained the situation. I told him that I would be late, but I could get my parents to drive me to work once the whole crash fiasco was settled. He told me to go ahead and take the day off, so I had a day to myself to be sad and mourn the very best car I ever did own.

You may be thinking, “wow, that’s a lot. There’s no way there could be more!” But I am here to tell you that there is more. Much more. In fact, this is where things just start to get good. I did title this entry, “I wrote off four cars in three years,” after all, and we are running out of time, chronologically, for that to be true!

Through insurance, I was provided a rental car for two weeks while everything got sorted out. Two weeks. I do not remember what kind of car it was, but I do remember it being a white sedan.

During that two-week period, there was a night where I was on my way home, minding my own business on the country roads near my acreage when suddenly, a deer came out of nowhere.

Does this story seem hauntingly familiar to you? Yeah, me too.

Luckily though, this time the deer did not write off the vehicle, but it did take a chunk out of the headlight cover. Something about headlight damage also feels familiar…

Anyway, as the two-week duration was coming to an end, it was apparent that it was going to take a while for the insurance companies to organize all the details of my accident to give me the payout that would be used as a down-payment on my next vehicle, so we needed a plan. My parents decided it would be a wise idea to buy a very cheap, very old beater to have as a back-up plan in case incidents happened where one of us might be out of a car, since they seemed to happen a lot. So, they bought a 1999 Toyota Camry for $1000 and it was to be my temporary wheels until I was able to get myself my own vehicle.

It was a very good plan.

Until.

Late October or early November, I do not have the exact date documented anywhere that I can find, I was on my way to work. A beautiful sunny day, not a care in the world.

A feeling, you might say, of familiarity.

Before I turned onto the same single lane highway I always took to work, I was in the right-hand lane of a different double-lane highway. I did not know that I was in the blind spot of the semi truck to my left.

Ah, semi trucks. More sweet, sweet familiarity.

The driver in the truck decided that it was time he needed to change lanes. I had enough time to try and speed past him to get into the shoulder and honk my horn to warn him of my whole existence, but it was no use. The semi continued to lean towards me until finally, it collided with the 1999 Camry of which I was driving. I heard the sound of metal dragging from headlight to taillight against the entire side of the Camry, and just as it got to the end, enough momentum was created to flip my car one hundred and eighty degrees until I was facing the wrong way on the highway.

The driver of the truck was stunned and afraid. Based on the panic on his face when he ran to meet me at my window, I am pretty convinced he thought he had killed me.

I was not stunned. I was not afraid. I was very calm, and after apologetic words flew out of his mouth at a million miles a second, I said, “don’t worry. I’m fine. I know what to do. I was in another accident just a short while ago.”

I instructed him to go back to his truck and remain exactly as he was when the accident happened. I told him I had called the police and that they were already on their way. I offered him a cigarette to calm his nerves.

I guess it had gotten to a point where being ping-ponged by various vehicles just felt normal to me.

All those last three accidents, by the way; the Celica, the rental, and the Camry, happened within a fifteen-minute drive of each other, within the span of a few short months. Lucky me.

For a while after, speaking of things I had grown accustomed to, my dad kept an eye on the used section at the Toyota dealership until something affordable and reliable came along. Finally, in the lot, there was a bright blue Kia Forte. Standard.

I named it Mezzo, because… Mezzo forte. Music. Ha.

Not the first car I would pick for myself, but a car that would just have to do. My cousin took me to go and get it when the day came, and that is the car I have been driving ever since. Three years is a hefty record for me, and I am proud of how far I have been accident-free.

There is one more fun, quick story about my Kia that I would like to tell you before I go.

I discovered that if my e-brake is not pulled until the very last click, which requires a two-handed reefing on the handle, that it is not fully engaged in this particular vehicle, and that it will, in fact, roll if it is on a slope.

I discovered this at a gas station when I got out to fuel up my car, and I had locked my door. As I was following the steps on the prompts for payment, my car began to slowly roll forward… towards an SUV parked just in front of it. I panicked. I scrambled to unlock my car so I could get inside and stop the catastrophe that was about to occur, but in my hurry, I could not get myself to push the button on the fob. Desperately, I grabbed hold of my door handle and with sheer will and adrenaline, I somehow became a superhero for a minute and managed to stop my car.

Thank god, because if that failed to work, my next actual plan was to place myself between my car and the SUV and act as a barrier to avoid damage. Yes. That is a real thought that went through my head, and yes, I was really committed to it.

There you have it: my complete driving history. I would like for there to be something to take away from everything I post here, but with this one, I have nothing. I have absolutely zero idea what you could possibly take away from this story.

Anyway, I have started learning to ride a motorcycle this year. I will let you know how that goes.