So there I was, driving down the highway toward Dalmeny with Chelsey in the passenger seat. I have the cruise set at about 122km/h, and I’m slowly weaving in and out of the traffic. After passing a couple vehicles, I notice a van behind me that’s passing everyone that I do, but never passing me. The more people I passed, the more people he passed. After about 15-20 minutes of this, I decided that he would be my highway driving teammate. I’m driving a Buick Terazza, and he’s driving something that looked like Brenon’s Chevy Venture. Together, we were two vans on an epic journey down the highway.

Eventually, he pulled into the left lane to pass. It hurt in my heart for a moment, because I knew that my partner was leaving me, but I felt strong that we had lasted this long. As he inched past me going 124km/h, I noticed that he was hauling a literal van-full of shit. There was boxes, cases, bottles, packages and pretty much every other container imaginable in that little green minivan of his. As astonished as I was, I was not ready for what I saw once he switched back into the right lane ahead of me.

Strapped on top of two bikes at the back of the van were two sickly yellow laundry baskets, held in place with rope. I had to lean back in my leather seat to fully comprehend the packing wizard that was driving the van ahead of me. ‘Simply stunning’ I thought to myself. Then, as if I wasn’t amazed enough, I noticed that his van full of possibly contraband caused it to ride extremely low. And by extremely low, I meant EXTREMELY LOW. After scouring Google and Flickr for about half an hour, I still had not found a single picture of a van that resembled the one we saw. Instead, I will try and describe the low-ness.

Look at your keyboard right now. The distance from the ground to the bottom of the van’s exhaust pipe is roughly the equivalent of the distance from your ‘Q’ key to your spacebar. So low that one tiny bump could prove disastrous.

So once the van was ahead of me, I was determined to stay behind it. This van had ‘Accident’ written all over it, and I wanted to make sure I was there when it happened. As the overloaded vehicle traversed bumps and dips, we watched as the exhaust pipe bounced precariously close to the road. Silently we both prayed that the van would encounter a speed bump, or even some roadkill.

However, our unwaivering attention didn’t pay off. When we arrived at the Langham turn-off, the van continued going forward to its destination. As we turned onto the empty road, we sat in silence; our hearts filled with a massive feeling of complete let-down.

If anything, this journey has taught me that a highway driving teammate is fun to have, and watching him almost bottom out his van is even funner.