We Interrupt This Blog For The Following Golf Cart Accident...

Meters swum today: 1500
Playing in the background: Jean-Michele Jarre, "Rondez-vous 4" (and sorry about your dad, Jean.)

I believe I've regaled y'all with members of my family and their penchant for getting into bizarre accidents. Particularly my dad. The infamous skiing crash comes most immediately to mind. There were, of course, any number of light plane incidents before that, a rather interesting sailboating accident, a couple of crackups in automobiles and who the hell knows what all else. I've only been around for the last 40 years, you understand; the thirty before that are a complete mystery, and my mom's not talking.

I gotta say, though, this one takes the cake. My dad somehow managed to do damage to somebody's car with a golf cart. Yes, that's a golf cart. While going backwards. It never would have occurred to me that you could possibly cause injury to persons or property while backing up in a golf cart. It also never occurred to me that golf cart accidents can kill people, or that nearly 150,000 people were injured by golf carts between 1990 and 2006. I'm glad somebody keeps statistics on this stuff because honestly, that's staggering. That's five times as many people who have ever been injured by BASE jumping at any time in history. Okay, there aren't as many BASE jumpers as there are golf cart drivers, but why ruin a good statistic with a healthy dose of reality?

My brother-in-law opined this evening that people in my family should perhaps not be allowed to own motor vehicles. And he does have a point. Myself, I've done pretty well as far as my accident track record. Two sailboat wrecks, neither of which did any damage to anybody else; four car accidents, only one of which was my fault, and all but one of which were pretty minor; one regrettable incident during my only flying lesson (plane zero, coyote one) and then there was the time I drove a speedboat into a dock going pretty darn fast--okay, maybe I haven't done so well. However, talk to a couple of my uncles and cousins and you'll get boat wrecks, car wrecks, cars accidentally driven into rivers (ask Kyle about that one), sailboats sailing into tornadoes (now that was a story), and the list no doubt goes on. I do think, though, that this is probably the first serious golf cart wreck in family history, unless you count the time my sister drove one into a tree when she was seven. (Tree one, golf cart zero.)

Anyway, nobody was hurt and insurance is going to cover the damages and so forth and so on. But I think I might put my plans for buying a three-wheel ATV on hold for a bit. My bike just looked at me funny, and I gotta tell ya, that hurts.