Roads not taken

I could have died yesterday.
It isn't much of an observation. In this world we can almost die every day, several times over. Most of the time we don't notice the possibilities, but they exist nonetheless.
Yesterday I got my face rubbed in it. I was taking my daughter to a bowling party for her 4th grade class. We're driving along, and I get to the turnoff where I would normally go to get the place. But right in front of me is an oil tanker truck, and I really don't want to be stuck on a one-lane road behind something that slow. So I don't make the turn, going straight and taking a different and slower route to the same place. I get there right on time anyway, and as I'm signing her in, a guy comes out and says that some kids might be delayed, since there was an accident on a certain street. It semed an fuel oil truck had been hit and overturned!
A couple of hours later I go back to the place to pick up my daughter, who was having a lot of fun and didn't want to leave, but what can you do? I took a different route home, the one I would have taken going down, and sure enough there was still a circus on the road, trucks with flashing lights everywhere, and the same oil truck I didn't want to be stuck behind, now upright on the grass.
That got me to thinking, especially since it was my turn to blog on my publisher's site and the subject was time travel of all things. I don't much care for how backwards time travel is portrayed, usually too many inconsistencies in it. But sideways time travel is of great interest, worlds at the same moment in time but with different histories. For example, one where I followed that truck...