Bovineophobia

Pin It I made that up. You guessed that, didn't you? I thought it sounded better than heiferophobia or plain ole' cowophobia.

So ... the trip home ... and how it relates to bovineophobia:

We left the campsite at 10:00 on Sunday morning. Ideally, we would have left a little earlier, but it took a couple of hours to pry the baby out of the hands of my girls.

It was an 11 hour drive, which practically means 13 hours after stops for a couple of meals and a couple of bathroom visits. I always forget how the trip home stretches out! We were thinking about getting home at 11, so we ended up not meeting another friend along the way. We should have taken the time to do so. Maybe I would not have bovineophobia now if we had.

So ... 10:30 pm. I had just sent a facebook note that we were in TX and didn't have far to go. Kids were asleep and we were excited to be on familiar ground.

We turned onto the dark highway. Black cows. Black night. Black road. Shriek, crash, screaming.

900 miles driven. Half an hour from home and unfenced cows decided to cross the highway. There were three cows hit and we hit at least two of them. Each side of the car had damage, but (thankfully!) we didn't hit any of them with the middle of the car. Our airbags did not deploy and there were no cows across the hood or anything like that.

The sleeping kids were awakened ... by my screaming rather than the impact. I'm a little embarrassed by that now. Between my screaming and the fact that I threw up every time my eyes went into the vicinity of the cows, we learned that unless there is a need for screaming and throwing up, I'm probably not the best person to have around in an emergency. At least in an emergency involving livestock. There were no injuries to people at all. I was a little bit sore, but even that was minor. My car was repairable, thankfully. I'm very fond of my car and really did not want it to be totaled!

Because I strive for this to be a poop-free blog, and well, when you hit a cow driving at about 70 mph, there is poop involved, I'm just posting a couple of pics. I didn't even realize there were dents on the driver's side until I saw the pics. I knew the mirror was gone, but the dents were a surprise.



And now we're just waiting for my car to be finished. And we're still busy being thankful that the cows were small. Not calves, but not big huge 1500 lb cows either.

Oh - and get this - the DPS officer said that we were NUMBER SIX to hit cows on that road THAT WEEK. Oh my. Let's all hope some farmer fixes his fence before someone is killed!

For the rest of the night, my friend came and got the kids because we didn't know if the car was drivable or not (it was). We just let them keep the kids overnight because the next day was our last class day of co-op, and the kids all wanted to be there. Jim and I drove home ...

... and were pulled over for driving with a headlight missing. The officer said "um, I think this is probably the least of your problems." LOL Um, yeah ... pieces of the car are flying off as we drive, it's covered in poop ... go ahead and pull us over. Thankfully he just gave us a warning and said that he usually tells people to drive more carefully, but in our case, he'd just tell us to watch out for cows. Um, yeah, thanks for that.

It was still a fabulous vacation, and I can't wait to go back to Disney World! I think we'll drive straight through I-10 next time rather than cutting off though! At least if it's dark!