Last weekend, I drove to the tiny village of Jaulzy, France, for a four-day writing workshop with seven other english-language speculative fiction writers living in Europe. I’ll cover the workshop in another post. Here’s what happened when I tried to drive home on Tuesday.

The trouble started, of course, when we’d packed Ruth‘s and Nancy‘s luggage, and the ladies themselves, into my Dinky Toy, and I got behind the wheel. It’s never a good sign when you try to switch on the headlights, and the switch is already in the proper position. And indeed, when I turned the key, nothing whatsoever happened.

The dead battery issue was resolved in no time at all, thanks to John and his car’s battery. But when we drove off, another problem presented itself: my GPS navigator was unable to use the available sattelites to position us correctly on the map, instead displaying our little arrow in fields or buildings, and getting all confused about it. After ten minutes of aimless driving through the French countryside, I stopped the car in a nameless village and Ruth and I resigned ourselves to finding the way on my worryingly large-scale map.

Of course, by the time we were five minutes from the village, GPS suddenly understood where we were. The only problem was: it insisted I was driving backwards. This made the device entirely useless, since the next couple of crossroads, turns, and instructions were well below the bottom edge of the screen.

It was around this time that I noticed the gas gauge, whose needle was pointing firmly in the red zone.

To make the first part of this long story short: 14 kilometers further down our road, we stopped for gas, and by that time, my Tom Tom had figured out I was in fact driving forward. The rest of the drive to Charles de Gaulle Airport passed without incident, and at about 2:15pm, I said goodbye to Ruth and Nancy at terminal 2D, and drove onto the A1. At that time, I had a little over 4.5 hours of driving ahead of me. I should be home by 7.

The drive went swift and trouble-free, until I approach Antwerp. A huge electronic sign warned me of an accident at some village I’d never heard of, and ensuing gridlock starting at another village I’d never heard of. The second village showed up soon enough, in the shape of flaring brake lights and blinking warning lights of the hundreds of cars ahead of me. How long can this be, I thought, optimistically; if they’re naming a village, it must still be south of Antwerp, right?

Wrong. I turned on the radio to discover that the accident had in fact occurred on the eastern Antwerp bypass, about 15 kilometers ahead of me. Not that it mattered all that much how far it was; it took me an hour to cover even the first of those 15.

Thankfully, an opportunity presented itself to bypass Antwerp on the west, and drive to Amsterdam by way of Rotterdam instead of Utrecht. It would be a detour, and Tom Tom informed me that it would cost me another half hour. But at least I was moving again. I sped through southern Holland, past Dordrecht, and could already make out the Rotterdam skyline.

Then, as I was overtaking a right-lane slowpoke on the middle lane, an enormous white van swerved at me from the fast lane, so sudden and so far over the line that it was only the Dinky size of my car that saved me from collision. I braked and honked my horn as the van crossed all the way into the right lane.

My brain hadn’t even gotten around to feeling shaken about the near miss before I saw a smoking tire bounce towards my grill.

Thankfully, there was no car or other large metal object attached to the tire. It bumped my bumper, disappeared under my car, and reappeared in my mirror a quarter-second later. Cars behind me managed to avoid the unexpected object, and I focused on the road ahead, wondering where the tire had suddenly come from.

The white van was still in the right lane, going so slow I suspected the driver was as shook up as I should have been. In the middle lane, where I still was, some smoke was wafting around. And in the left lane, was a big black Benz, sans one rear tire, wheel rim throwing out smoke and sparks. Incredibly, it was speeding away from me.

Apparently, there had been some kind of mishap, with the white van and the black Benz both attempting to pass me at the same time. I have no way of knowing exactly what had happened, but the result was one pale-faced and slow van driver (I checked as I passed him) and one Benz driver convinced he could make it to Amsterdam with one of his tires left behind.

Over the next 10 kilometers, I kept my eyes open for any sign of the Benz. But though there were no exits, gas stops or other escape routes, neither was there a trace of the tireless automobile. Until I turned into the two-lane westward curve onto A20, and noticed that the three cars ahead of me were carefully keeping their distance from a smoke-and-spark-throwing black Benz that needed both lanes to negotiate the curve.

To make a long story not too much longer, I grabbed my phone and dialed 112 (the European equivalent of 911). Moments later, a highway patrolcar passed me and stopped the Benz, and I was able to continue my eventful way north to Amsterdam. And thankfully, apart from a half-hour traffic jam north of Rotterdam, and an unbelievable rainstorm near Leiden, I finished my journey without any more mishaps.

Except, of course, that my wife was expecting me for dinner at 7, and I stumbled exhausted into our home at 10.