Time stood still

I had the weirdest experience last week; what made it even stranger is that the person I was travelling with also experienced it. 

I regularly take my little old Mum out for a drive. She is registered disabled these days and has failing eyesight - which is deteriorating rapidly - so is unable to take herself out-and-about any more. Believe me for a woman who spent seventy-eight years of her life being fiercely independent, as she approaches eighty, having to rely on others is more than a little frustrating for her. Anyway, I digress. 

I am lucky to live in an area where I have the sea to the south of me, less than a fifteen-minute drive, woods to the north of me within walking distance; the Southdowns and all the beauty they offer to the east, and New Forest national park are both within an hours drive, so I don't need to travel far to enjoy whatever outlook takes my fancy. My Mum prefers the seaside. Due to her eyes she cannot see much in the woods and forests anymore as they are often too dark for her - I much prefer a nice, dark wood - so we often take a little pootle out, stop at a local garden centre for a coffee and drive back via the sea front. 

There are only so many routes I can take but I do try to mix them up a bit, otherwise it could become a bit of a bore. Last week I decided to cut through a road we drive often. It runs between a housing estate on one side, a country park on the other. There are enough trees along the road of the housing side to hide the properties at this time of year. The distance from one end, to the other, is 1.3miles - just over 2km to those of you who are metric. At the one-third point from where we joined the road is a small roundabout, so you have a total of one-mile to complete. Not a long distance and with a speed limit of forty mph it takes just ninety-seconds to get to the end of the road. It's one of those roads where you could go faster so once at forty you stay that way until you have to stop at the T-junction which signals the end of the road. This is where everything went a little 'weird'.

That one mile felt as though it had taken around twenty-minutes and we weren't even within sight of the end. I kept checking on my dash to see what speed I was doing as it felt as though I was crawling along, yet each time I was bank on the forty mark. Time seemed to slow right down and the trees which should have been changing as we drove by them didn't, yet at the same time they were moving. That's exactly how it felt too. As though the car was stopped and it was the trees moving, however, only a small section of them. If you've seen an old movie you'll know when they are travelling down a road in the car, they themselves are in fact stationary and it was the background which moved, but because they had limited space you would see the same section of background repeated. Cartoons do it a lot too. The background is constantly repeated.  That is exactly how it felt. 

After what seemed like an eternity I turned to ask my Mum if she thought the road seemed to be going on forever. Imagine my surprise, when at the exact moment I was about to ask her, she asked me the very same question. She too felt as though I was driving at just one-mile per hour, and said it was as though the trees were moving, but we were not. Both of us appeared to be experiencing the exact same thing. We did also comment on there being trees either side of the road, when in fact the country park side is mostly a grassy mound, with flat land behind. The trees are a good one-hundred feet away from the road. 

When we did finally reach the end of the road, we both said we felt as though it had taken us about thirty-minutes, when it reality, it had taken us just under two. 

Did time stand still? Did we enter some kind of time slip? Was it just a case of the road being straight, the trees around us being green that we felt as though we weren't moving? I honestly do not know. I have no answer for it; I am sure there are a multitude of different reasons. What I do know is that even now, one week later we are both still talking about how weird it was and trying to come up with a logical explanation. We even drove down the same road over the weekend to see if we experienced anything similar. This time, as all the times we've driven it before was completely uneventful.