I drove someone else’s car from NC to Buffalo New York to deliver some caracals to the Buffalo Zoo around Thanksgiving one year. If was 70 degrees in NC, and a blowing snowstorm in Buffalo. The windshield wipers died (in what was to me a blizzard), so I pulled off at the nearest exit to find someone to fix them for me (sticking your head out of a window to see during a snowstorm doesn’t work very well). The guy at the car shop looked at me and said “What are you doing here? You need to get out of this neighborhood. Quick.” Luckily, he fixed it for me quickly and I got out of there. Quick.
I finished my meeting at the zoo and on the way home (with week-old serval kittens tucked inside our shirts to keep them warm), in heavy traffic and ice, the car in front of me slammed on their brakes. I had no choice, so I tapped mine, we spun 90 degrees on the ice and continued sideways down the highway at about 50 mph. It lasted long enough for the person sleeping next to me to wake up and for me to say “Hang on, we’re going off” just before we plummeted down an embankment on the side of the road. We came to a stop at the bottom, but the angle was too steep for me to get back up to the highway, even with 4 wheel drive (not a single soul in that heavy traffic stopped).
The guy with me passed off his kittens to me, climbed out, and jogged in front of the car cross-country (everything was covered in a blanket of snow so I was concerned about driving into a ditch or creek). We eventually wound up in the middle of a Native American Reservation, where some very grumpy individuals gave us instructions on getting back to the highway.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. Thankfully.