My wife and I drove from Toronto to Colorado. No particular place in Colorado, we wanted to explore all over the state. After crossing the border from Ontario into Michigan, we stopped at a supermarket, where we loaded up with cold cuts, breads, cookies and other treats, soft drinks, snack foods, and other such things that would work for lunch at Interstate rest stops. Our plan worked well, and I-80 to me will always mean pulling over for a ham and cheese on rye with yellow mustard, with a can of Coke. But we got a lot of things at that supermarket in Michigan, and by the time we got to Colorado, there were some things we hadn’t yet started in on.
Well, we did explore around the state. Even spent a night at the Stanley Hotel, in Estes Park. The next day we set off for Rocky Mountain National Park via (IIRC) US34, which would take us up to 12,000 feet altitude, over the continental divide.
Somewhere above the tree line, we heard a “boom!” from the back of our SUV. I was driving, and my wife, in the passenger seat, turned around.
The bag of potato chips that we had bought in Michigan, and had not opened, had exploded in the rarified atmosphere at that altitude. We were fine, our SUV was fine, there was no problem. Except for the chips scattered around the back.
I took a municipal bus ride that had a booming incident. A huge truck narrowly side swiped the bus, took the half-meter side mirror off and gave us a booming hit-and-run in the process. I sat right behind the driver when it happened at a bus stop. Naturally all the passengers and I disembarked and retraced to the bus station. A less memorable but hilarious part was hearing the bus driver growl out a pejorative phrase one couldn’t utter in this thread.
I also have a 'Things in Your Kitchen That Go “Boom!” story I just remembered…
Many years ago when I was a young man not too long out of college, living on my own barely making ends meet, I was making dinner. I had something steaming or boiling in a pot. I had a hodge-podge of kitchen stuff, and I didn’t have a top for the pot, so when I needed to cover it I made do with a shallow Pyrex glass baking dish I happened to have that just fit on top of the pot. It’s oven-safe, why not? I had used it as a stove top pot cover dozens of times before with no incident.
I had my back to that boiling or steaming setup, prepping other stuff at the counter, when suddenly BOOM! Millions of tiny chunks of Pyrex glass exploded out in all directions, including pelting me on the back. Thank God I had my back to it. I was finding tiny chunks of glass in odd corners of my kitchen for months afterward.
I later learned that Pyrex had a history of sometimes exploding like that under certain heat conditions, or at least an older version of Pyrex-- I think they have since improved its safety since then.
I’m assuming you lost your meal because I can’t see how shards wouldn’t have gone into the steaming pot itself. Not necessarily, but I can’t see how that’s a chance you could take.
I don’t remember what I did for dinner after that, but yeah, I’m sure whatever I was steaming was a total loss.
One saving grace to the Pyrex pyrotechnics was that the Pyrex exploded into chunks, like windshield safety glass, not razor-sharp shards like ordinary window glass. Whether that was a Pyrex safety feature or just some inherent quality to Pyrex glass I don’t know, but if it had been shards like window glass, things would have been much more dire.
Huh, we used to have Pyrex plates, until we moved to a house with a tile floor in the kitchen. We had little kids, too. One by one, the played were dropped and exploded into a thousand razor sharp shards, all over the kitchen.
Okay, the last few plates were removed, not dropped. But those little explosions were spectacular. And surprisingly loud, too. So i guess this post is more on-topic than i realized.
We had a lab accident once. Fellow pulled out two powerful hotplates, turned them all the way up, and put Pyrex glass baking dishes on them. Soon one of the dishes exploded, so he turned that hotplate off and picked up all the glass pieces. Then he mixed a big beaker, maybe 2 liters, of sulfuric acid solution, and poured it into the remaining baking dish, which of course promptly exploded. I was working nearby and barely registered what was going on until the last moment, when I ducked behind a benchtop and gave out some sort of a yell.
