So, here we are Ron. I’m 68 today. Merlin has sent me a Facebook message calling me an old git!
Cheeky bugger!
The Asir mountains, the start of which, from Jeddah, was Taif - as you say a long climb in a low gear. As a boy of 21 I used to go over old shap. Admittedly, there was never winter snow on Taif, but it was about 10 times as high as shap.
Then you would wind back and forth and up and down among the peaks and valleys of the mountains, to Abha and Khamis Mushayt. In my case in a 240 HP Saviem.
Some forty years later I still have dreams of climbing those mountains. So steep in my dreams I sometimes fall off backwards and wake sweating!
Also, told before somewhere on here, my dream of the brakes failing on a particular hill on that road. Next morning, being given a load for Khamis. I came down that hill, so vivid in my dream, in first gear! Obviously I survived.
When I had the Amtrak franchise, we had a driver with a Liverpool accent, about 22 years old. One morning, as we were loading, he said ‘ey, John, I’ll have to drive carefully today - I had a phone call at 5.00 am from a friend of mine. He said he’d had a dream that I was going to crash today. Thing is, he had a similar dream about his Grandad dying and later in the day, he found he had!’
Talking to another driver at about midday, I could hear sirens in the background. Sure enough, that driver had cornered too fast, no seatbelt on, gone out through the open window and the van had landed on him!
I don’t believe in life after death and all that stuff, but I do wonder if I’d ignored my fears from the dream whether I would be a long forgotten footnote in history!
John
