April 11, 1976. Erica and I were traveling west on Rte. 304 towards New City on a trip to buy Geraniums. As we passed Goebel Road (I think – the name doesn’t seem right), someone ran the red light and we hit him. I watched in slow motion as Erica left the passenger seat and put her head through the windshield. Luckily, she has a hard head, but she twisted her leg pretty badly and had to be in a full leg cast for a few months. My head bounced on the ceiling a few times, but the knock on the head probably did me good.

I have not driven in a car without wearing a seat belt since that day. Our 1969 green Chevy, named Nell Nova, was mostly totaled, but the insurance company paid to fix her up. Nell didn’t do well on speeds over 50mph ever again.

This was the end of the store we had on Burd Street in Nyack. I was still on unemployment and was working odd jobs, but Erica could not get to the store. Erica missed the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and she was stuck in a hot apartment all Spring and most of the summer.

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I thought that I would experiment with embedding the map in the blog. It is not as easy it it appears. Google is easily confused and I wound up having a map of Dearborn Michigan – I have no idea why. I eventually copied the link to the map, closed the browser, and then pasted the url. Then the embedding html worked correctly.