I once was woken up by the buffeting of an articulated lorry hurtling past in the opposite lane. I was doing sixty ish in my own lane, in a Peugeot 205. I eased up on my working hours a bit after that.
During The Troubles, I went to a colleague's leaving 'do' in a hotel a couple of miles from the South Tyrone / Donegal border. In what, charmingly was called bandit country. The same as most others in my then line of work,
I was developing a real drinking problem. At age 22.
Despite being two, or more likely three times over the limit, I had the bright idea of running a delicious blue eyed blonde home to her village, several miles away, almost on the border. There was pretty thick winter fog which made reading any of the direction signs impossible. She navigated us back to her place and a couple of hours later, I departed for home. About forty miles away. As soon as I drove out of her driveway, I turned in the wrong direction and quickly got lost. A short time later, I rounded a bend too fast, hit black ice and slid sideways at speed through a border post manned by the Irish police. As I slid past their bunker, out of control, I saw two policemen running into the road trying to put on jackets, gun belts and carrying assault rifles. I braced myself for gunshots, but none came.
I ended up, about thirty yards into the Irish Republic, with my little MG Midget stuck in a hedge. If I'd have done that in a British Army checkpoint, I'd have ended up looking like a colander, because squaddies were usually on a hair trigger.
Once the two policemen realised that they were unlikely to be under attack by a drunken fool in a bright yellow Midget, they were very helpful in helping me get the car back on the road. Luckily it wasn't damaged, they gave me directions to get onto the A road that I needed and off I trundled, more slowly than before and promptly got lost again, almost immediately. More by luck than anything else, I found a signpost directing me to a road I was familiar with and I arrived home, incident free, an hour or so later. There's a lot to be said for being a lucky SoB.