Over The Hill and Through The Woods …

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This guy was driving down the road, coming around a sharp bend on a “foggy” night (he thinks it was foggy anyway) at a high rate of speed and failed to negotiate a 90-degree corner completely and went straight. Went straight over the guy’s lawn (airborne as he came off the road), accelerated as he landed, tore up the guy’s lawn, took out an 8″ apple tree, sent the tree flying over 100 feet, then jumped the septic system, went through the woods between two trees just barely wide enough to fit the vehicle, crushing in both sides of the vehicle, causing the car to start to spin as he flew over a 4-foot wall, while taking out several good-sized trees as he continued through the woods and landed about 20 feet from the wall.

He climbed out of the vehicle, injured by obviously still able to walk, tried to find his way out, saw a light and climbed through the underbrush (probably injuring himself more) and walked back to the house he started from.

He gives me a call to go recover the vehicle, not telling me where it is or how bad of shape the vehicle is in. We get there and talk to the landowner (where the apple tree was), who gave his permission to enter his land to get the vehicle. At this point, however, it became clear that where the vehicle landed was NOT on his land. The police informed us we could not attempt to recover the vehicle without the other landowner’s permission. After doing some searching for an owner, we found a telephone number for his uncle, who lived out of state, who informed us that the landowner was out of the COUNTRY, at which point we had to wait to hear from him.

About a week later, we get a telephone call from the landowner, who has returned from Europe. I had to go discuss with him how we were going to recover the vehicle with the least damage to his property. The landowner very kindly agreed to let us cut and remove a few trees for easier access. We had to winch it through a wild rose garden (and YES, THEY DO HAVE THORNS!)

All in all, this was my longest recovery to date, in that it took 2 weeks from start to finish.