Omaha Wedding Photographer – Daniel Dunlap

I had been looking forward to Valentine’s weekend for a few weeks. My wife and I were planning on going to Lincoln, NE to celebrate my brother-in-law’s wife’s birthday. This has been our typical way of celebrating V-day for a few years now and it has worked out fairly good. So this past V-day should have really been no exception. Boy was I wrong.

We left Saturday afternoon and arrived at my bro-in-law’s house at about 4PM. He was expecting several guests and we were the first ones to arrive. AWESOME! That meant we got first dibs on all the grub he had out for the party and I was starving! As we were eating up all his food the guests started to arrive and that meant it was time for me to get out the camera! I nabbed a few shots and mingled a little then it was off to the piano bar where we were going to finish out the night. Sounded like a blast. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of going to a dueling piano bar but I highly recommend it. Before my wife and I could go to the piano bar we had to drop Alayna off with her Grandma and Grandpa at the Embassy Suites in downtown Lincoln. It would be just a short walk to the bar from the hotel which means we wouldn’t have to drive, so this worked out very well.

My wife planned on staying at the hotel for a while to talk with her parents a little since they live quite a ways away and she doesn’t get to see them very often. No problem! I just walked down the street two blocks and met up with the rest of the group.

When I arrived I was greeted by the birthday girl that things had gone sour and they might be leaving. As it turned out, no one reserved any tables and the place was packed. My bro-in-law told me he didn’t know he had to reserve tables and he was visibly upset because the party he had planned for his wife’s birthday was in trouble of collapsing. As for the birthday girl, she wasn’t very happy either. There was a little bit of drama for a moment (if you were there you know what I mean) but it was fixed quickly as we just got ourselves a table in the regular bar and just socialized. In the end I think it was better this way. Maybe it’s just me but it seems like there is always a little drama over little insignificant things.

My wife finally texted me after all the confusion and I walked back to the hotel to get her so she wouldn’t have to walk to the bar alone. Lucky for her she missed all the ‘fun’!

The following day brought a small amount of snow to Lincoln and Omaha. Pretty typical for the area and certainly nothing I couldn’t handle driving in. After all we had yet another birthday party for one of my nieces to get to back to in Council Bluffs, IA.

The roads did not seem bad to me while we were still inside Lincoln city limits. As we got outside of Lincoln things turned bad and they turned bad very quickly! The wind was blowing very hard and it was picking the snow up and driving it across the interstate. I’ve heard of white out conditions but I had never personally experienced them before. I literally had trouble seeing the hood of my own car! It was terrifying to me and it was magnified because I had my daughter in the back seat and my wife in the passenger seat.

As we approached an overpass there was a 20 – 25 car pile-up that was strung out on both sides of the interstate. One car stood out among the wreckage. It was embedded into the front end of a semi-truck and it appeared to be squished like an accordion. The first thing that came to my mind was, “Whoever is in that car is dead.”

I tried my best to keep my composure and keep my focus on the road because we still had to drive four more miles until we got to the nearest exit. Every ounce of my being wanted to stop the car right then and there and hope the weather would pass soon but I knew that had I stopped the car the next person behind me wouldn’t be able to see me until it was too late. So we kept going. That was the longest four miles I have every driven in my entire life.

When we finally got to the exit we pulled into a very run down hotel and got a room and I paid for a whole night. There was hardly any heat, the sheets on the bed were stained with god knows what, the bathroom was absolutely filthy, and I had no idea how long we would have to stay there but after what I had just seen on the interstate there was no way I was going to get back out there until I was absolutely sure it was clear.

When it was finally clear we went straight to my brother’s house to drop off my niece’s birthday present and visit for a while. It was good to be back in our home town!

After we hung out with my brother and his family for a while we went straight home and got there just in time to watch the nightly local news and the top story was the wreck we had seen on the interstate. The car that had caught my eye was driven by a young college student that was on her way back to school at UNL after being gone for the weekend. She was going to be celebrating her 21^st birthday the following day. She didn’t survive the crash. I pray for her family and the loved ones she left behind.

As for the lesson I learned, it’s one that I’ve heard time and again but this time it really hit home…

You never know what day could be your last so cherish all of life’s moments.