This story is another from Russia - and there's more where it came from.
There was a friend of my parents who owned this Volvo which he'd had for years. He loved this car and looked after it diligently, but the only place where he could get parts for it was in Poland. This meant that whenever he wanted to take his car in for a service, he had to drive around seven hundred miles and although this was along the best roads in Russia, it's still a long way.
The thing about this road was that, although it was very good, it was also virtually deserted and you could go miles without seeing another vehicle. This led one to drive at ridiculously high speeds along it, as this guy was doing on this particular occasion.
So he was tootling along at 120 mph when he sees this lorry in the distance. Fine, he thinks, and when he comes up to it he just pulls out to go round, not realising that another lorry was coming in the other direction.
Just think of the odds. This is a very long road with very few people driving on it and yet three vehicles converge on the same place at the same time. Unfortunately for the man in the small (but sturdy) Volvo, the other two vehicles were rather bigger than his.
The situation, therefore, is this:
Car travelling at 120 mph. Too fast to slow down and pull back behind
the first lorry
Lorry to his right
Lorry straight in front
Big ditch to his left
In his situation, I don't know what I would have done, but he chose the
ditch option, which would have been fine but for one small problem: he
turned over and slid along this ditch upside down.
First the roof of the car started buckling and he thought he was going to
get crushed to death, but it held and he survived that.
Then the windscreen shattered and he thought he was going to be sliced
apart by flying glass, but it was safety glass and that didn't kill
him.
Then the mud from the ditch started pouring into the car and he thought he
was going to be drowned in a pool of stinking water, but the car ground to
a halt and the mud stopped pouring in, so he lived through that one.
The lorry drivers had stopped and helped him out of the car, totally unhurt. They then turned the car out of the ditch and back onto the road. On trying the ignition, they discovered that not only did the car still work, but it still moved quite nicely. So the Volvo driver continued his merry way to Poland under his own steam.
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