John recounts the night.

p.s. i saw john and dave last night and.. wow. it hurts to see them all bandaged up and all messed up and painful looking like tht. i realize that i’m really afraid of pain.

Norcal trip, stumble, fall……. [21 Nov 2001|04:47am]
The trip started not so great and we lagged about 3 hours behind our scheduled departure. I was planning to get the tank filled for the trip but we didn’t due to time constraints. (this turned out to be a good thing later) By the time we picked up Waylan, it was around 7 pm and we didn’t hit Fremont till well after 1 am, stopping to eat and get gas. James stayed with his HS buddies and Waylan stayed with his family, basically leaving Dan, Dave, and I in the motel room while Big Show Jeff came to visit us.

The trip was all in all great and I’ll write more on it later but the ride home was one of the scariest moments in my life ever.

We didn’t leave Norcal till about 10 pm because we were hanging out with some friends. I remember David saying that James should get some rest since he was driving and also since it was after the rave and he might have been feeling cracked out. James said he was fine and we were off for home. On the ride home we got a little lost and ended up heading towards Oakland. This threw off our trip time by about 1 hour as we had to backtrack to get back on the 5 fwy. I fell asleep a little bit later as did almost everyone else; at the most critical time in our trip.

I remember the car hitting the bumps on the road, the ones that separate the lanes from one another. I woke up briefly to tap James on the shoulder and ask him “are you ok to drive?” He said he was and also I noticed him talking to Dave. I figured everything was fine and if he was too tired he would ask one of us to drive, so I went back to sleep. The next time I woke was the to the sound of our car tires screeching and my first thought was that we were going to rear-end someone. I didn’t even get to open my eyes in time to see the impact but I felt the car hit something and hit it hard along the side, frontal area of the car. I opened my eyes to see the car heading towards darkness. My friends awoke around me as well, saying things like “what did we hit”, “what’s going on”. Then I heard a loud thud accompanied with the sound of broken glass and the panicked cries of my friends. The car began to flip and roll over and I held my head for safety. At that point I have never been so afraid before for my life. It all seemed so unreal, so impossible that the car could be flipping so rapidly and so many times. The accident seemed more plausible but when the car began to flip I thought it was sometime more out of a movie than something that could be happening to me and my friends. As the car tumbled what seems like an eternity, shards of broken glass and dirt began to fill the car cutting my skin and making it hard to keep my eyes open. Finally the car stopped, from what I recalled was flipping 11 times, and ended up on its top. I still remember being disoriented and saying what did we hit, where are we, what happened, only to hear “we got in a car accident, unbuckle your seat belts and get out of the car.”

more on this later…… must rest now