Back in the spring of 1993, some friends and I decided to go to the Smoky Mountains for spring break. I had just bought my very first car, a classic baby-blue 1982 Nissan 300SX.
As we left St. Louis for Tennessee, I was fiddling with the CD player. I had a Discman jacked into one of those cassette tape thingies that you insert into a cassette player in the dashboard. Yeah, pretty high tech. Anyway, I was changing the disc and not watching the road, and I drifted left a bit too far, hitting the interstate guardrail at 70 miles an hour. The entire left side of the car was scraped to bits, and the driver-side door was badly dented.
My poor baby! But, what’s done is done, and the Smoky Mountains still awaited. So we soldiered on, me a little sobered by the fact that the accident could’ve been much worse, and my friends joking about my bad driving. Later in the trip, we decided to re-enact the fateful moment when I hit the guardrail. The result was a classic photo that I loved so much I had it blown up and hung in my room for years.
As it turned out, the driver-side door wouldn’t even open any more, so we spent the rest of our week-long trip climbing over each other to get out the passenger side. I later had the door repaired so it would at least open, but the lock never worked quite right. (I later had a radar detector stolen out of the car, likely because of the lock issues.)
Ahh, good times. That trip had a lot of good memories… just ask Dirk.