Timed to perfection

You know those moments where everything just seems to line up perfectly? After being inside all day you look outside to see a sunset that puts your wall paper to shame. When you’re outside in the sun and dirt, digging a hole thinking about how thirsty you are and someone brings you a glass of lemonade. When you’re rewinding a video and stop on the exact place you wanted.  I love those moments. Those moments make me feel like a superstar.

I had two of those moments on one day very recently. On Sunday afternoon I was driving our athletes to Denver so they could catch a flight to Europe early on Monday morning. It’s normally a two hour drive and we’d heard the weather was going to be bad. Being the conscientious we are we left a day early to stay a night in Denver and make sure we got to the airport in the morning with plenty of time. Four minutes from home in Avon we rounded a corner to witness a sea of glowing red lights. Hundreds of brake lights glowed and nothing moved. At that precise moment the announcer on the radio came on the air to let us know that there’d been an accident on the I-70 between Minturn and West Vail and the traffic was backed up like a parking lot. Def Leppard’s drummer couldn’t have had better timing. It was one of those moments.

The next one of those moments followed twenty minutes later. While we were playing eye spy and waiting for the traffic to clear we’d changed radio stations. As the traffic returned to full speed the new announcer came on the air to tell us that the I-70 was backed up because of an accident between Minturn and West Vail. It was another one of those moments…except an hour too late.

In the twenty minutes we were waiting for the accident to clear the bad weather had arrived and sent all the traffic on the I-70 into cardiac arrest. If we were going to be sitting in traffic for the next little while eye spy was not going to cut it. Perfect time to get some reading done. Unfortunately, Shantaram was so engrossing that I didn’t see the traffic moving again and lost several places in the jostle for pole position in the traffic jam. Clearly reading wasn’t going to work either. What do you do when your car isn’t fancy enough to have a DVD player? You improvise and put a laptop on the dash. That way I could watch a film and still watch the traffic at the same time. And everyone in the car could join in. Perfect! It made five hours driving feel like four!

Predictably, the next morning dawned bright and sunny with clear skies and roads. But those couple moments where everything lined up perfectly made it all worth it. Those moments are golden.