...The end of a Jetta...

8/16/09 will forever be remembered as the day my Jetta (probably) died. The story is unique, almost surreal, but in the end nobody was hurt, and I may end up with a new car out of the deal, so I'm not going to complain.

I drive a 2001 White VW Jetta. My dad bought this car in '00 or '01, and sometime in '05 I bought this car from him as part of a car swap. The car has treated me well, and out of all of the cars I have driven, it felt the most likely the Audi 80 my family used to own. I didn't like the color much, but beyond that, it treated me well.

On Saturday night, I was staying at Trav's house in Ayer, MA - we had our summer league tourney and our team was shacked up there. A few of us parked our cars across the street from his house on the lawn area that was outside of the white lines that marked the edge of the road. We have parked there numerous times for various gatherings, with no issue.

At about 6:20am on Sunday 8/16, the entire house was awoken by a loud crash/bang noise. At first, from my room in the back of the house, I thought for some reason something had happened within the house, but after waking myself up a bit more and looking out the front, I realized a woman had crashed her car in front of Trav's house.

At this point, in looking outside, and after 911 was called by a few other friends, it became clear that everyone was okay, which was nice. I decided to go downstairs with other teammates and see what really happened. As I looked out the window I realized my car was missing a hubcap - I was disappointed to see I had lost one, I didn't know when that had happened. As I reached the bottom of the staircase, a teammate said, "you should look at your car," or something along those lines.

Still groggy, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how my car could be involved in this - I was asleep, the car was parked in a series of 3 or 4 cars, I was not the car on the end, what kind of sense does this make? I walked out of the house still in my pajamas, and it became clear, and the story unfolded.

My car, as I said before, was parked on the side of the road - a driver who clearly lost control and/or focus, struck my car at a pretty good clip, and then swerved off the road. Her airbag deployed, I believe she had a toddler in the car with her (details on who was in which car are still fuzzy to me). There were 3 people who saw the accident - The driver, her toddler daughter, and her mom. They were in 2 seperate cars, I am not entirely sure how it all happened, and strangely, I don't really care much.

The damage is as follows:





This may not do it all justice, but I am pretty sure it's total damage. The tire sorta popped off the axis, and it clearly is turned the wrong way. I am going to take advantage of this opportunity to do some car shopping, realize how lucky everyone is that nobody was in the car and nobody was injured, and see what happens next.

To the girl who hit me: Don't stress out, thanks for making my decision to get a new car easy, and good luck with your insurance payments...