You're not gonna believe this one.

So here I am in Virginia, in the house I grew up in. I've forgotten how intense the wind is here - the house is on top of a ridge with no protection from it. Most of the pine trees have grown with short, bent branches on the west side, and the snow usually blows out of our front yard and off the edge of the hill into the woods before it has a chance to melt. Kitty-Boy said he's such a city slicker, he assumed at first that droning sound was traffic.

Finally, we're here. Now, I love travel - always have - even though it never, ever seems to be calm and uneventful.

'Round 2 AM somewhere in Indiana, our train hit a car that had tried to race the crossing. We on the train barely felt a little jolt; many slept right through it. The car, on the other hand...Jaws of Life. Ambulances. Totalled. Wreckage all the way across the tracks, and the crossing signal itself knocked over and blinking uselessly in the snow. (Fortunately, no one was killed, only miraculously minor injuries.)

Now, all the emergency personnel with their flashing lights were on one side of the train. From the other side came this completely blotto drunk-driving poster child who somehow managed not to see the gigantic Amtrak train stalled across the road, and plowed right into it. Cans of beer from the case on the front seat spilled out all over the road. This driver was uninjured enough to stagger over to the cops and present himself for arrest.

One guy on the train had a video camera and caught it all; he was showing it to the whole lounge car in the morning. It's OK to laugh if no one is killed. A warning to my friends: in a dispute between a car and a train, the train almost always wins. Even if it isn't moving.

You're not gonna believe this one.

So here I am in Virginia, in the house I grew up in. I've forgotten how intense the wind is here - the house is on top of a ridge with no protection from it. Most of the pine trees have grown with short, bent branches on the west side, and the snow usually blows out of our front yard and off the edge of the hill into the woods before it has a chance to melt. Kitty-Boy said he's such a city slicker, he assumed at first that droning sound was traffic.

Finally, we're here. Now, I love travel - always have - even though it never, ever seems to be calm and uneventful.

'Round 2 AM somewhere in Indiana, our train hit a car that had tried to race the crossing. We on the train barely felt a little jolt; many slept right through it. The car, on the other hand...Jaws of Life. Ambulances. Totalled. Wreckage all the way across the tracks, and the crossing signal itself knocked over and blinking uselessly in the snow. (Fortunately, no one was killed, only miraculously minor injuries.)

Now, all the emergency personnel with their flashing lights were on one side of the train. From the other side came this completely blotto drunk-driving poster child who somehow managed not to see the gigantic Amtrak train stalled across the road, and plowed right into it. Cans of beer from the case on the front seat spilled out all over the road. This driver was uninjured enough to stagger over to the cops and present himself for arrest.

One guy on the train had a video camera and caught it all; he was showing it to the whole lounge car in the morning. It's OK to laugh if no one is killed. A warning to my friends: in a dispute between a car and a train, the train almost always wins. Even if it isn't moving.