Coincidences OR Miracles - Judge for Yourself

I've always believed in miracles. I've seen quite a few of them in my life. The interesting thing is rarely do I see them as they are happening, but as I look back they just pop up all over the place.

I believe someone once wrote that, 'a coincidence is God performing a miracle while choosing to remain anonymous.'

I don't believe that many coincidences are really anything but miracles.

Let me tell you the story of last night and let you judge for yourself.

My partner and I like to leave around 11pm on our Monday trip. Hasn't happened lately, but we try.

This week's trip was dispatched Tuesday at 1:30am. I called in at 7p to see if shipping had started loading our trailer. They'd just put one on the dock and it was next to load. Cool - it usually takes about 4 hours to load a trailer, we'll be able to leave at 11p.

I call in at 10:50p and the trailer's not complete yet. Got 6 of the 8 shipments on. Yeah - ok, we're going to get out on time. I arrive at the yard Tuesday at 12:30am figuring we could be gone by 1am and in Galatia by 7am-ish.

First of all, the trailer has been done since 11:30p and hasn't been pulled off the dock yet. So I have to hunt up one of our trailer jockeys to go pull it out of the dock so I can hook the tractor up to it. This takes about few minutes, he has to verify it's completed before he can move it.

Secondly we have to wait another few minutes for another truck to pull out of the slot where we have to back into to load our rollers.

Lastly, with the new PeopleNet logging computer system we have in each of our trucks, we have to input the trip data and request a verification message that we have the correct trip before we leave. This is usually a short process, but it took quite a bit longer to receive the trip confirmed message.

Oy vai. It seemed like everything was working against us. I grumbled about shipping, about the limited access for our roller storage and about the super slow computer. We left the gate at 1:30am.

I drove and drove and drove, over Monteagle, through Nashville across the TN/KY state line and then across the KY/IL state line on I-24. Just about 40 miles from our first stop in Galatia, IL is the I-24 west /I-57 North split.

Now before I left, I took a peek at the WeatherChannel to see what the road conditions were going to be like. They predicted rain/ice the last 20 to 25 miles in KY and into S Illinois. So I was wary as I drove. No ice formed on the truck mirrors or windshield wipers and the road, though wet and with a temp of 32 degrees, was not slick at all. So I continued at the posted 55mph (for trucks) speed in IL.

4 miles before the 24/57 split the traffic came to a grinding halt. No movement at all. Finally the word came back through the CB that 3 miles ahead 3 semi trucks tangled up on some ice at the bottom of the hill and were completely blocking the Westbound side of I-24. I heard another report from an Eastbound driver that 2 miles further another semi-truck had jack-knifed on a bridge and had the road blocked.

We sat completely still on the highway for over 2 1/2 hours (I heard the back-up was 10 miles long) before the IL State Troopers started allowing everyone to drive across a paved median crossover and go back East and take a detour.

We could see the carnage of the 3 semi trucks as we reached the turn-around point. Looks like one truck jack-knifed, one t-boned the 1st and a 3rd ran into the back of the 2nd. What a mess. Don't know the condition of the drivers. (Although it really didn't look like anyone could have survived in truck #3.)

As we took the detour though, it hit me, if we hadn't had those delays we might have been right in the middle of that melee, or may have had a bad time dealing with the slick ice. Wheeew!

I learned a lesson on this trip, to be thankful for 'irritating' coincidences, they might just be miracles in disguise!!!