Blindspots can KILL!!

Was making my weekly pilgrimage down to Melbourne just yesterday (Friday) night and it was pretty uneventful - nice cruise, maybe a little over the speed limit; well, ok... the one or two 120 kph, but ONLY because I was overtaking the slow pokes and I needed to pass before oncoming traffic wipes me out!

And let me digress a little bit before I tell this story; I'm quite surprise how people blatantly ignore speed limits! (Ok, this is going to sound ironic/double standard) but I was going at around 120 kph in a 110 kph zone and there are cars easily passing me!! I mean, they are going probably around 130-140 kph!! Crazy! Well, ok - not so crazy - I've seen people doing 180 kph on the highway - that is crazy; you can visibly see the car vibrate and shudder at the wind stress.

So anyways, I've reached the Western Ring Road and just got off the on-ramp from the Western Highway into a relatively packed, but smooth flowing traffic behind a truck. It was going pretty slow and so I thought yeah, let's go on to the fast lane and overtake it. I looked in my review "yep, the car in the other lane is pretty far away" then I look at my right side view mirrors "yep, still far away" and from the corner of my eye there wasn't any tell-tale lights from cars in the lane beside me. So I flipped my indicators on and started to switch lanes. Then I suddenly thought, might as well check my blindspot, just in case. And I did. And lo and behold, what do you know, there's a car there! So I swerved immediately back into my lane (and I was accelerating out too) and managed to sit behind the truck with about half a foot gap whilst the other car kind of slowed down and went slightly off the road and honking at me like crazy.

So the lesson of the day, need to do head checks!! And it figures, 'cause when I went to get my license I almost failed because I didn't do a lot of head checks... ^.^;

Yup, blindspots can wipe you out too!