Today I met up with my friend Gilbert, who I’ve known ever since the fourth grade. Out of all of my friends, he was the first one to get married, the first to have a kid (well, his wife, anyhow) and the first to buy a house way out the in the middle of nowhere (just kidding, man).

Thus, in the morning I headed out for my epic journey 80 miles northeast to check out his new place. The drive up there wasn’t that bad; sure, I missed one exit ramp, but we all make mistakes. During the course of the day, we caught up on what has happened in our lives since we hung out, ate some delicious carne asada prepared by his lovely wife, watched Dodgeball on DVD and even played a selection of games on his Xbox. Good, harmless fun.

Or so I thought.

As I bid farewell and drove towards the freeway, I was surprised to see just how much fog had come in since my trip up in the morning. Once I entered the foothills, I quickly became enshrouded by cloud cover and had to struggle to make out the lane lines on the road ahead of me as I desperately tried to follow the twists and turns of the freeway. At one point I even contemplated pulling over to the side of the road just to get my bearings, but the visibility was so low that I couldn’t even see whether there was any space on the shoulder.

It sounds ridiculous, I’m sure, but for a guy who hasn’t driven in nine months, it was a pretty harrowing experience. Thankfully I made it home alive. . . although I probably wouldn’t be missed, my parents would have been rather upset had their car been totalled.