"Hindsight is 20/20"
Yesterday I drove my daughter back to Dublin to start the new term at college. The four-hour trek from Donegal took almost five hours yesterday morning. With snow still lying on many major routes, that seemed fair enough. I didn't mind taking things a bit easy.
What I hadn't counted on was fresh snow falls in Dublin followed by an instant freeze.
When I left Dublin at 5pm the five-minute drive to the motorway turned into a nightmarish 30-minutes skating on black ice. The ususal 30-minutes on the M50 strecthed to 1 1/2 hours.
The rest of the journey wasn't quite so bad... just long, dark, exhausting... I arrived home at 11.45 after driving for more than 6 1/2 hours with a brief stop for a coffee and a can of Red Bull (horrible brew but it did help to keep me awake).
I doubt I would have even started out on the journey if I knew what was in store, although I'm glad to be snowed in at home rather than stuck in Dublin.
Life has a habit of serving up the unexpected! The temptation is to abort, give up, abandon ship... Caution can save lives in the face of treacherous driving conditions, of course. But I wonder... how many of us give up what is good because we are faced with 'black ice' at the first junction?
