First published through The Paris News on Feb. 17, 2017. The article can be found on their website at http://theparisnews.com/opinion/article_3dd08e8c-f535-11e6-b0c2-937aab914635.html and was backdated.

I know quite a large number of people who have been cut off while driving. I’m no different.

I mean, I’ve cut people off many times before myself and I’ve felt bad for doing so — at the time it happened.

However, there was a time I was following a church van I, too, was cut off from an exit.

Before I get into the story, let me give a little back story.

Every chance I get to travel with my dad, I take it. For about four consecutive years, we traveled to Slidell, Louisiana. For those who don’t know where Slidell is, it’s a little more than 30 minutes northwest of New Orleans.

We were traveling there because he was accepting his degrees in theology. So, we would attend the ceremonies.

The first two times we went, I was in charge of directions. Honestly, it’s pretty much a straight shot with only a couple turns. I believe it was the second trip to Slidell when I looked at the map and thought we were to continue straight. We came across a bridge over Pearl River. My geography knowledge isn’t the greatest. We looked up and saw a sign which said, “Welcome to Mississippi.” Of course, we missed our turn.

We didn’t fret over the ordeal because, we were about eight hours away from where we started. The mishap was but a fraction of the time taken.

We turned around in the rest area in Mississippi right across the Pearl River bridge. We were a day early to the ceremony, so we weren’t worried one bit.

This brings me to my story about getting cut off.

Just a few years after this, I was following my dad driving a church van filled with people. My car was filled with teenagers.

As we were following the van, now about four hours away from home, we came up to an exit the van’s vlinker signalled it was about to take. I turned my blinker to signal “hey, I wanna scoot over.” We were on a rather busy highway and when I began to transition into another lane, a pickup truck comes flew by my car causing me to miss the exit. I was supposed to take to follow everyone else.

With the many times of traveling with my dad, I wasn’t worried one bit. I knew somewhere further down the road, I could turn around and meet up with them. Not realizing how far the turn off was, I had one of the guys in the car with me call the van to let them know what happened. With about a 20 minute detour, we were back on the road following the van. I tried my best afterwards to not fall too far behind.