Okay, so you're on a long, boring car trip on the Interstate, going about 90 mph and you drop a Cheeto or maybe your cell phone between your legs. "Can't quite reach it," you say to your wife who is riding shotgun "here, grab the wheel for a second."

This from today's paper about a fatal accident in northern Wyoming:

"She had been steering from the passenger seat as her husband bent over to look for something. Authorities say they went off the road and landed in a deep ravine where they weren't easily visible."

The wife died and the husband was trapped in the car for 24 hours until the car was found. He was able to give relatives a vague location via his cell phone, but it was a long time until highway workers spotted the car down in the ravine.

Maybe part of the solution would be for us to all practice steering from the passenger seat.

Here's another one from the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

"A 60-year-old woman killed last week when her car rolled from a stop sign into oncoming traffic was identified Thursday by the Clark County coroner's office as North Las Vegas. She was driving a Chevrolet Cavalier and had stopped on Ferrell. Her teenage son was in the car, and the two decided to trade places so he could drive. While they were doing so the car, still in gear, rolled into eastbound traffic on Craig, police said. A 2006 Ford sedan hit the Cavalier, throwing the woman from the car. She was pronounced dead at the scene."

The first thing that jumped into my mind was she should have had her seatbelt fastened, and then I remembered they were trading places, so she wouldn't have had.

Dumb as these stories sound in retrospect, it could have been any one of us because let's admit it, at one time or another we've all been distracted while driving and had a near-miss or two.