One Inch

One.

That's all the space that's left between my belly - my enormous belly - and the steering wheel.

This struck me as potentially unsafe. Fancy that! Eric and I are careful drivers, but that doesn't mean that someone won't do something awful in front of us or behind us, generally in a white mini-van.

Mini-van owners, take heart! We had a bad experience with one a few years back and haven't recovered from it yet. I'm sure you would never rear-end our car, at an intersection that was under construction, with the flagger in the middle of the road, after you'd returned from a 250 mile drive, just 4 miles from home. Not you! But one did and smashed the hell out of our car. I was driving. We were stopped by the flagger and he was standing in front of our car. I looked in the rear view mirror and noticed a white mini-van bearing down on us and it didn't look like it was going to stop. There was no where to go. Forward would have had me running over the flagger, so all I could do was gasp and hold on. I couldn't even warn Eric in the time there was between noticing imminent doom and impact. Fortunately, no one was injured, although the car was one step from being totalled out by insurance.

So, there I was, behind the wheel of my car noticing that only my finger fit between belly and wheel and decided this could be bad in case of an accident. I casually mentioned it to Eric who then really looked at me in the driver's seat and agreed. I pulled over and we swapped positions. When I looked over at him, he had well over twelve inches of space between his belly and the steering wheel.

And on the way home?

No accidents occurred. Whew!

So I guess I'm off driving duty until the space between me and the wheel increases again. Someday.