After 3 days of driving about 4 hours a day we are now in Seattle area for a few days visiting friends

 It's nice to rest a little bit. At 74 driving even 4 hours a day for 3 days straight is a lot. However, I remember being 16 to 25 and driving 15 hours straight places but I don't do that anymore. Also, I tend to drive mostly from about 10 to around 6 pm because I find it safer at this age to do that. At the first sign of tiredness I either buy a coffee or a chai depending what's available. Because I do remember falling asleep at the wheel and even going off the road a little when I was younger and bolder and more of a risk taker than now.

My father told of a story when he was with a bunch of people in his church (younger people) and they were driving I think from Seattle to San Francisco and literally everyone in the car had gone to sleep because they were driving through the night where they were off the road and bouncing because he the driver had gone to sleep too. His friend was next to him and said:" What are you doing Fred?" And somehow they didn't blow a tire and got back up on the road no worse for the wear. But, cars were made more sturdy in the 1940s than now too even though they didn't handle as well without radial tires and disc brakes. Both these advances saved a lot of lives.

However, when I bought a new 1968 Camaro in 1968 I was 20 years old then and I was on the 405 likely near where the LAX is (los angeles international airport) and I saw a car fly up into the air in front of a group of cars I was in. I knew this was really bad and that most of the cars in front of me or behind me would be totaled (and people didn't wear seat belts then so it could be fatal for me too. So, since I had a sports car and wide tires I was able to go into the center divider emergency lane. By doing this at about 75 miles per hour (most cars couldn't do this because they didn't have sports car handling like I did) I came out of all this without a scratch. I simply slowed down fast in the emergency lane while cars cars all around me to my right in the awful group accident and kept driving slowly down the emergency lane until I was clear of all the mangled cars. Remember this was rush hour and this was an incredible mess and somehow I survived it and so did my car without a scratch.

Sometimes it pays to have a muscle car that can handle well in quick turns like a race car. It allowed me to survive this situation along with my car.